Into Something of Meaning for Consumers by Ken Gerhart, Research Manager, Craig Hospital , Marketing Health Promotion, Wellness, and Risk Information to Persons with Spinal Cord Injuries Living in the Community Researchers typically share and disseminate their findings at professional conferences and venues, in the scientific journals of their field, and in reports to their institutions, sponsors, and funding agencies. We found a huge, hungry, and grateful audience. Together, these two projects have distributed thousands of informational brochures on a wide range of disability-specific topics, to people with spinal cord injuries living in the community. Though there is no shortage of information out there, good, accurate disability-specific information is in short supply. During in-patient rehabilitation programs consumers are barraged with an overwhelming torrent of information, but information that they see as being relevant to them diminishes quickly once they return to their communities.
Consumers are intelligent and discriminating.
They know what kind of information they need. They are able to read and understand scientific information, but they are frustrated with the frequent difficulty in digesting confusing and contradictory bits of information, and in extracting meaning and relevance from research reports. Second, we involved consumers in our dissemination plan. We then involved consumers in evaluating our products. We used focus groups, patient education classes, in-patients who had a free hour, outpatients waiting for an appointment, family members, etc.