Developing a primary care research agenda through collaborative efforts – a proposed “6E” model

BACKGROUND Primary care research is at a crossroad in South Pacific. A steering committee comprising a member of WONCA Asia Pacific Regional (APR) council and the President of Fiji College of General Practitioners garnered sponsorship from Fiji Ministry of Health, WONCA APR and pharmaceutical agencies to organize the event in October 2013. This paper describes the processes needed to set up a national primary research agenda through the collaborative efforts of local stakeholders and external facilitators using a test case in South Pacific. METHOD The setting was a 2-day primary care research workshop in Fiji. The steering committee invited a team of three external facilitators from the Asia-Pacific region to organize and operationalize the workshop. The eventual participants were 3 external facilitators, 6 local facilitators, and 29 local primary care physicians, academics, and local medical leaders from Fiji and South Pacific Islands. Pre-workshop and main workshop programs were drawn up by the external facilitators, using participants' input of research topics relating to their local clinical issues of interest. Course notes were prepared and distributed before the workshop. In the workshop, proposed research topics were shortlisted by group discussion and consensus. Study designs were proposed, scrutinized, and adopted for further research development. RESULTS The facilitators reviewed the processes in setting the research agenda after the workshop and conceived the proposed 6E model. These processes can be grouped for easy reference, comprising the pre-workshop stages of "entreat", "enlist", "engage", and the workshop stages of "educe", "empower", and "encapsulate". CONCLUSION The 6E model to establish a research agenda is conceptually logical. Its feasibility can be further tested in its application in other situation where research agenda setting is the critical step to improve the quality of primary care.