NCI Introduces Funding-Related Webinar Series

Cancer SIG members Marie Chesaniuk, MA, and Elizabeth Lyons, PhD

This year, the National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute (NCI) introduced a new webinar series related to funding opportunity announcements. The first webinar of the series, held May 11, was hosted by NCI’s David Chambers, DPhil. The webinar focused on the current round of dissemination and implementation funding initiatives.

Traditionally, research has focused on three transitional blocks: Transition 1, from basic to human clinical research; Transition 2, from efficacy to effectiveness; and Transition 3, changing clinical practice. But for this funding round, NCI is emphasizing a fourth transition: dissemination and implementation aimed at optimizing the impact of research. NCI is prioritizing making the most of the research and evidence based treatments already developed. This round emphasizes de-implementing strategies that are not evidence based, have been prematurely adopted, yield suboptimal benefits, or are harmful and wasteful.

This represents a movement to investigate the steps in between the beginning and end stages of interventions and outcomes. This round of funding specifically does not support the development of new interventions, but instead supports leveraging already designed evidence-based interventions in clinical and community settings. The core of implementation is how treatments are deployed in order to improve patient outcomes. These aspects include feasibility, fidelity, penetration, acceptability, and sustainability. The philosophy here is that these aspects of implementation support service outcomes and result in outcome improvements.

What else this funding initiative compels is a transdisciplinary approach. In order to carry out dissemination and implementation work, partnerships with stakeholders must be created. This is a multi-level approach that includes the policy, regulation, and institutional politics and climates that facilitate or obstruct dissemination and implementation of evidence-based strategies. While this type of work could easily fall into the cracks of specific local institutional politics, the goal of this initiative is the generalizable knowledge to be gained from these situations.

This past August, NCI in collaboration with the Society of Behavioral Medicine offered a webinar about new priorities in behavioral research including cognition, integrated data analysis, and cancer communication in new media. The recorded webinar, information regarding all six funding opportunities, and notices of future webinars can be found on the NCI Resources for new Funding Announcements webpage. To view a recording of the May dissemination and implementation (D&I) webinar and to get more information on the program announcements discussed in the webinar, visit the NCI D&I Funding Related Webinars webpage.