Zooming Out: Research, Implementation, and the Road Ahead (BETTER Women 5/5)

In this fifth and final episode of the BETTER Women series, Jennifer and Emily zoom out from the study itself to explore what the results actually mean — and why mixed findings are far from failure. Dr. Ruth Heisey reflects on what the project got right, why peer health coaching remains full of promise, and what the healthcare system stands to lose if prevention keeps taking a back seat. Implementation scientist Laura Desveaux then offers a reframe: effectiveness research tells us if something works, but implementation science tells us how to make it work in the real world — with real people, real constraints, and real complexity. Jennifer and Emily close the series by reflecting on what it means to produce a podcast in real time, as a research story unfolds. [download transcript (http://mattersofengagement.com/wp-con...) ] More episodes in this series: • Trailer (https://mattersofengagement.com/comin...) • Episode 1: Going “Upstream” to Prevent Chronic Disease (https://mattersofengagement.com/going...) • Episode 2: The Science behind Peer Health Support (https://mattersofengagement.com/the-s...) • Episode 3: Voices from the Heart of the Project: Peer Health Coaches (https://mattersofengagement.com/voice...) • Episode 4: Learning From Unexpected Results: What the Numbers Didn’t Capture (https://mattersofengagement.com/learn...) Related research: • Assessing the effectiveness of “BETTER Women”, a community-based, primary care-linked peer health coaching programme for chronic disease prevention: protocol for a pragmatic, wait-list controlled, type 1 hybrid effectiveness-implementation trial (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles...) • Improving chronic disease prevention and screening in primary care: results of the BETTER pragmatic cluster randomized controlled trial. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24252...) • Results from the BETTER WISE trial: a pragmatic cluster two arm parallel randomized controlled trial for primary prevention and screening in primary care during the COVID-19 pandemic (https://bmcprimcare.biomedcentral.com...) Links: • The BETTER Women project (https://www.better-program.ca/evidenc...) • Canadian Cancer Society (https://cancer.ca/en/) • Women's College Hospital (https://www.womenscollegehospital.ca/)