It is with considerable pleasure that I welcome Dr. Howard Schachter as the Director, Research and Assessment.

Howard is a leader, in both his personal and professional life. We look forward to serving all of KMbW’s clients with enhanced research and assessment abilities.

Peter

Biography:

Research, education, training, mentorship and advocacy have been the hallmarks of Dr. Howard Schachter’s more than two-decade professional career within the social and health sciences, with ways to realize these aims becoming increasingly clarified, refined and expanded over the past ten years in his work as a health services researcher.  A key part of his experience has involved “translating” into stakeholder-appropriate policy, products, processes and procedures1 the findings from primary2 or secondary3 research, which have chiefly concerned the effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare or education.4  These “translations” have then been mobilized in order to facilitate various stakeholders’ (for example, professionals’ or laypersons’) adoption of the practical recommendations stemming from these observations.  The ultimate purpose of the work has been to initiate, assure or improve the quality of the organization, access to, delivery and outcomes of healthcare or educational practice.

Integral to his approach has been determining the credibility of current knowledge5 regarding the behaviour or activities that are necessary and sufficient to effectively and efficiently: 1) organize, provide access to and deliver stakeholder-specific practice; and 2) translate, then mobilize in stakeholder-appropriate ways this (hopefully) current credible knowledge about the healthcare or educational practice.  The validity of stakeholder-specific recommendations to adopt either of these sets of behaviour/activity within the context of healthcare or education largely depends upon the credibility of the current knowledge.

 

Over the past decade, Dr. Schachter developed the evidence synthesis and critical appraisal strategies as: Co-Director, University of Ottawa Evidence-Based Practice Center (AHRQ, US); Director, Systematic Reviews, Chalmers Research Group; Senior Investigator, CHEO Research Institute; and Scientist, Provincial Centre of Excellence for Child and Youth Mental Health.  Most recently, he built a multidisciplinary research team, which successfully obtained two Canadian Institutes of Health Research grants investigating the necessary and sufficient conditions for effective and efficient knowledge translation/mobilization.  At present, he is Assistant Professor, Department of Paediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa. 

Additional professional interests include: 1) the effective and efficient use of current credible knowledge in the analysis, modification and development of effective and efficient healthcare or education-related policy; 2) understanding (inter- and intra-individual variations in) the experience of continuity and change within the contemporaneous arcs of personal and transpersonal (that is, spiritual) development; 3) identifying whether, and how, the perspectives or practices of empathy and inclusiveness, ecology, holism and transpersonalism—either alone or in combination—might positively influence health- or learning-related behaviour or outcomes at the same time that they might successfully prevent or eliminate individually- or collectively-held, discriminatory viewpoints and behaviour; and 4) determining how best to prevent the biases of “experts” and their explanation-obsessed, interpretation-laden epistemologies, ontologies, cosmologies, concepts and vocabularies (for example, materialism-reductionism-dualism) from missing or ignoring—and thereby invalidating—the personal (and potentially shared) experiential meanings of events experienced by those “non-experts” who happen to come to their expert attention. 

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1 Examples include various forms and intensities of written technical report, peer-reviewed publication, policy brief, oral presentation, experiential workshop and course.

2 Primary research refers to empirical studies, which in collecting data, “create” scientific evidence.

3 Ideally, secondary research denotes systematic, scientifically rigourous and transparent syntheses and critical appraisals of existing scientific evidence.

4 Issues/questions have varied in their scope from the simple and narrowly focused (for example, treatment effects of a single pharmacotherapy) to the broad and highly complex (for example, school-based interventions to prevent or eliminate mental health discrimination/stigma), and have differed in their reliance upon quantitative or qualitative (for example, experiential) data, which were obtained from the various (that is, experimental, quasi-experimental and observational) types of research design.

5 Ideally, “current credible knowledge” is obtained from the question/issue-specific gold standard form of scientific/empirical evidence, whose scope is both up-to-date and comprehensive, and whose findings are vetted for their practical applicability through the clarifying lens of the “real world” experience and expertise of professionals and lay-persons.