Dr Jane Mills

Connecting Research and Policy to Practice Through Knowledge Transfer: Developing A Culture of Learning

As health professionals the way we work today is vastly different to the way we worked in the not so distant past. Technology has transformed work practices and our approach to finding and assimilating new knowledge.  Even so, we can still conceptualise our health care landscape as a place where silos of research, policy and practice activity exist. Organisations, teams and individuals who move easily between these three silos, or domains, are rare because of the difficulties encountered in the transfer of knowledge and the application of evidence at the point of care.  In saying this, the language of evidence-based practice pervades each of these domains. This paper argues that until organisations cultivate a culture of learning, the language of evidence-based practice will be empty rhetoric used for the purpose of meeting bureaucratic requirements.

Jane Mills is National President of the peak body, Australian Rural Nurses and Midwives which is transferring to become the Rural and Remote Nursing Faculty of the Royal College of Nursing, Australia at the beginning of 2009. Jane is employed by Monash University in the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Gippsland Campus as a Senior Research Fellow. Jane has a strong community nursing background, working for seven years in rural Tasmania as a ‘grass roots ‘ rural nurse, team leader and manager. Her PhD by publication centred on rural nurses' experiences of mentoring, re-invigorating international scholarly debate on this topic. Findings from this study have translated into policy and funding changes at both State and Federal Government levels. In 2006 she was awarded a National Health and Medical Research Council Primary Health Care Fellowship to undertake a four year program of research entitled Nursing in general practice: designing & implementing an applied model of research & development. Dr Mills main areas of expertise and interest are rural nursing, nursing in general practice, evidence based practice, grounded theory and action research.