The first Researching Women's Environmental Health (RWEH) Workshop will be held September 16, 2009 in Rochester, New York at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. This workshop was designed to achieve three aims.
The first aim i s to provide examples of environmental impacts on women's health in a manner that is clear and compelling to users of this information (health practitioners and the interested public).
The second aim of RWEH is to evaluate these research presentations as to their success in communicating to interest groups and their health care providers. Finally, the investigators hope to produce a publication from RWEH that can provide insights into what the consumer of research findings finds to be successful translation of research results. To this end they have invited an outstanding keynote speaker, Dr. Giudice, who has provided important scientific contributions to our understanding of the role of environment in women's health and has successfully translated this message for health care providers and the public. The other three speakers can address the science of women's reproductive health and its environmental influences compellingly and understandably, using examples from their own cutting edge work. A major emphasis of environmental health research currently is on """"""""translation"""""""" but there are few programs that evaluate the success of these translational efforts. This workshop is designed to provide such an evaluation, by doing in-depth assessments of the presentation of research results to potential """"""""users"""""""" of these results and getting feedback from structured focus groups, by experts in evaluation methods. The proposed workshop will achieve these aims by including excellent research presentations by outstanding speakers and then holding four break-out groups (one for each presentation) in which the groups (comprised of a mix of researchers, health care providers and interested community representatives) will discuss the """"""""take away"""""""" messages that were conveyed and what additional information (or changes in presentation of information) the group would want to in order to better understand the science and its impact. To evaluate the success of these efforts the investigators will invite qualitative researchers from the Health Services Division of the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine at UR to serve as rapporteur and to both provide feedback from the group during the wrap-up session and to produce a publication that will provide insights into what facilitates translation of research findings to the clinician and other consumers of research findings. The Advisory Committee for the RWEH workshop includes members of the three groups the investigators are targeting and will work to ensure a program that addresses the workshop aims and will assist in bringing information about the workshop to all constituencies. This workshop should be of interest to the National Institute of Environmental Health, with its strong emphasis on translational research, and the pressing need for evaluation of the ability of active researchers to successfully make these translations.
The first Researching Women's Environmental Health (RWEH) Workshop will be held September 16, 2009 in Rochester, New York at the University of Rochester. In this workshop we will evaluate how well presenters of new research on women's environmental health research succeed in communicating their science to health care providers and representatives of interested community groups. An end result will be a publication that may help researchers be more successful in translating their research results.
