Knowledge Translation and Transfer Research Across Quebec's Occupational Health and Safety Research Network

Knowledge transfer has been the object of abundant literature in recent decades. Various models and theoretical frameworks have been proposed, and numerous studies have been conducted on factors which facilitate or represent obstacles to knowledge transfer. In Quebec, researchers in Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) are linked in a network which groups together some 150 researchers. In the past five years, the strategic knowledge transfer arm of this network has organized a number symposia and events on this topic. The last such event specifically targeted translation tools, namely guides and training programs, with a book to follow. One of the goals of the knowledge transfer community in organizing activities of the like is to better formalize the expertise developed by OHS researchers. The object is to map points of views and perspectives specific to the OHS field, in particular user status. Albeit OHS researchers usually write little on this topic, most have been involved in transfer activities at some point in their career. We firstly present the particularities of the network, the socio-cultural context in which OHS evolves: network highly transdiciplinary, powerful field research thrust, multi-level partnerships-between users and organizations-background, importance of unionization, framework of paritarism underpinning OHS institutions and organizations. The subsequent sections provide an overview of the outlook respecting knowledge transfer and the concept of knowledge developed by the various component disciplines: health sciences, natural and engineering sciences, human sciences, management sciences, education sciences. This paper exposes the community point of view on three issues, namely: users as knowledge end-users, as knowledge co-generators, and as brokers or transfer agents. Each theme is substantiated with three examples of network-based research designed to illustrate the manner in which user themes were explored or integrated into the different projects.