title: Managerial leadership for research use in nursing and allied health care professions: a narrative synthesis protocol.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Nurses and allied health care professionals (physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech and language pathologists, dietitians) form more than half of the clinical health care workforce and play a central role in health service delivery. There is a potential to improve the quality of health care if these professionals routinely use research evidence to guide their clinical practice. However, the use of research evidence remains unpredictable and inconsistent. Leadership is consistently described in implementation research as critical to enhancing research use by health care professionals. However, this important literature has not yet been synthesized and there is a lack of clarity on what constitutes effective leadership for research use, or what kinds of intervention effectively develop leadership for the purpose of enabling and enhancing research use in clinical practice. We propose to synthesize the evidence on leadership behaviours amongst front line and senior managers that are associated with research evidence by nurses and allied health care professionals, and then determine the effectiveness of interventions that promote these behaviours.
  
  
  METHODS
  Using an integrated knowledge translation approach that supports a partnership between researchers and knowledge users throughout the research process, we will follow principles of knowledge synthesis using a systematic method to synthesize different types of evidence involving: searching the literature, study selection, data extraction and quality assessment, and analysis. A narrative synthesis will be conducted to explore relationships within and across studies and meta-analysis will be performed if sufficient homogeneity exists across studies employing experimental randomized control trial designs.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  With the engagement of knowledge users in leadership and practice, we will synthesize the research from a broad range of disciplines to understand the key elements of leadership that supports and enables research use by health care practitioners, and how to develop leadership for the purpose of enhancing research use in clinical practice.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  PROSPERO CRD42014007660.
authors.affiliation: The University of Ottawa, 451 Smyth Road, K1H 8M5 Ottawa, ON, Canada. wgifford@uottawa.ca.
authors.forename: Wendy A
authors.initials: WA
authors.lastname: Gifford
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Holyoke
authors.forename: Janet E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Squires
authors.forename: Douglas
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Angus
authors.forename: Lucie
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Brosseau
authors.forename: Mary
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Egan
authors.forename: Ian D
authors.initials: ID
authors.lastname: Graham
authors.forename: Carol
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.forename: Lars
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wallin
mesh_terms: D016390:Allied Health Occupations; D006302:Health Services Research / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006801:Humans; D007857:Leadership; D033262:Narration; D015399:Nursing Research / Q000458:organization & administration*