Background: Health services research can benefit from frontline clinician input across all stages of research, yet their key perspectives are often not meaningfully engaged.
Objective: How can we improve clinician engagement in research?
Design: Convenience sampling and semi-structured interviews followed by descriptive content analysis with an inductive approach, followed by group participatory listening sessions with interviewees to further contextualize findings.
Participants: Twenty-one multidisciplinary clinicians from one healthcare system.
Key results: We identified two major themes: perceptions of research (how research fits within job role) and characterizing effective engagement (what works and what does not work in frontline clinician engagement). "Perceptions of Research" encompassed three subthemes: prior research experience; desired degree of engagement; and benefits to clinicians engaging in research. "Characterizing Effective Engagement" had these subthemes: engagement barriers; engagement facilitators; and impact of clinician's racial identity.
Conclusions: Investing in frontline clinicians as research collaborators is beneficial to clinicians themselves, the health systems that employ them, and those for which they care. Yet, there are multiple barriers to meaningful engagement.
Keywords: clinical research; clinicians; health services research; quality improvement.
© 2023. This is a U.S. Government work and not under copyright protection in the US; foreign copyright protection may apply.