Abstract

The Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF) and partners have created an innovative training program to support healthcare executives use research evidence in their decision-making: The Executive Training for Research Application (EXTRA) program. The overall mission of the EXTRA program is to develop capacity and leadership to optimize the use of research-based evidence in Canadian healthcare organizations. EXTRA ‘fellows’ – the health care executives – are selected from a pool of applicants each year. The new cohort of approximately twenty-four fellows each year is comprised of three professional streams: nurse executives, physician executives, and other health service executives. The purpose of this paper is to describe the EXTRA program, the perceptions of fellows from the first four cohorts, and the impact of the program on the use of evidence. Despite challenges balancing the time required to participate in the program the fellows were able to develop and apply a considerable knowledge base for evidence-informed decision-making.