Developing capacity around knowledge translation : a marriage of action and mindset

The burden of mental illness is having an increasingly significant impact on health globally with the cost estimated to be $2.5 trillion in 2010 and by 2030, it is projected to increase to $6 trillion (Marquez & Saxena, 2016). However, the unfortunate truth is that a majority of people living with mental ill-health receive limited effective treatment (Cleary et al., 2019; Patel & Thornicroft, 2009; Prince et al., 2007). Effective treatment is the progeny created from the integration of research and evidence into clinical practice (Elledge et al., 2019) to facilitate evidence-based best practice health care (Grimshaw et al., 2012). The integration of research and evidence into clinical practice emerges from the process of ‘knowledge translation’, which has been defined as “the use of knowledge in practice and decision making by the public, patients, health care professionals, managers, and policy makers” (Straus et al., 2011, p. 6). Lack of effective transfer of knowledge to practice can lead to missed opportunities in providing proper and high-quality consumer care (Cleary et al., 2018).