Brokering knowledge into the public sector: understanding improvement facilitators’ priorities in the redesign of hospital care

Like other public organizations, hospitals face increasing calls to innovate in the way they deliver services. However, health care continues to grapple with bridging knowledge ‘transfer gaps’. Failure to bridge these gaps prevents knowledge generated outside of health care that might inform such innovation from embedding and scaling. We explore how ‘improvement facilitators’ in one jurisdiction-wide intervention view the organizational factors that support their role as knowledge brokers. We conclude that ‘bridging’ new ideas and practices to the front line is a problem of legitimation, rather than just a matter of the relevance of the ‘foreign’ knowledge concerned.