Table 8. Reflecting on the learning from the WCEC knowledge mobilisation and impact processes.

Area	Enablers, challenges and reflection
Engagement and co-production with stakeholders	Working together with stakeholders from the outset is essential if research evidence is going to be relevant, timely and used by stakeholders. Co-production was essential to clarify the timeframe, research question, identify priority outcomes and identify the policy and practice implications. The close working relationship with the Welsh Government’s TAC and TAG ensured that the reviews were impactful e.g., directly informing Welsh Government policy officials in developing policy and plans. Close stakeholder involvement helped to build relationships and trust in the outputs of the reviews and the methods used. Ensuring stakeholders were involved during the evidence synthesis process (e.g., at stakeholder meetings) enabled an understanding of the methodology, its limitations and trust in the evidence outputs. Ensuring that stakeholders were able to attend and contribute to the stakeholder meetings could be challenging. This was mitigated by ensuring WCEC team flexibility and stakeholders sending representatives. Having a boundary spanning person, e.g., between the WCEC and Welsh Government, may be essential to enable good collaboration and co-production with Welsh Government groups, for aiding knowledge mobilisation, and for evidencing and tracking impact.
Stakeholder informed knowledge mobilisation and accessibility of findings	Knowledge mobilisation processes should be flexible to meet stakeholder need. Knowledge mobilisation is a 2-way process and should underpin the work from start to finish—we can push the evidence out, but key stakeholders need to pull it into their practice. The experiences and knowledge of stakeholders and public representatives is invaluable. Stakeholder input into the knowledge mobilisation plans was crucial to ensure findings reached relevant groups. They also provided considerable input to identify other groups that may be interested in the reports as part of the wider dissemination processes. Welsh Government evidence briefing sessions were useful to raise wider awareness of the findings, and to discuss policy and practice implications, knowledge mobilisation and impact. Welsh Government evidence briefings were useful during the COVID-19 pandemic where stakeholders were meeting frequently as teams (such as TAC and TAG). However, moving out of the acute phase of the pandemic, it was more challenging to ensure attendance, and presenting at stakeholders’ team meetings saw more attendees. Members of our public partnership group contributed equally as stakeholders and were able to fit in with the rapid timelines required. Their contribution was also invaluable to ensure the evidence was accessible to lay audiences.
Ensuring accessibility of findings	Accessibility of findings is essential if stakeholders are to use the evidence. The key findings, implications and strength of the evidence were summarised in an accessible language within the 2-page Topline summary, which was reviewed by stakeholders and well received. Infographics were useful but the additional time required to produce these should be factored in. A clear need for the infographics should be evidenced. Even outputs made accessible to the general public (e.g., lay summaries, infographics, our on-line public events) may not be readily available to some people e.g. those who do not have access to electronic and digital media. Public-facing engagement events may mitigate this, and consideration of the additional time and resources needed to do this well should be planned. Other methods of increasing the accessibility of findings e.g., poetry, storytelling, preparing videos, producing booklets which could be picked up in pharmacies may be useful. Any approaches should be accompanied by robust evaluation to assess effectiveness.
Potential impact and pathway to impact	To ensure that research findings feed into urgent decision-making processes, the timelines, outcomes. outcomes and the potential impact and pathway to impact should be identified and agreed with the stakeholders from the outset. Meeting the timeframe in which the relevant research output is needed by stakeholders is essential for evidence to be used and impact realised. Tracking impact and use of information by Welsh Government advisors and decision-makers was occasionally challenging where the key stakeholders involved had moved to different departments or left. Having a Welsh Government member ‘boundary spanning’ between the WCEC and Welsh Government was invaluable to help identify new group leads and contact Welsh Government members to collect evidence of impact. Impact beyond the informing of a policy or plan i.e., actual patient and public impact can take years to be realised. Plans for long term follow up should be considered. Evidencing the impact of wider dissemination can be challenging. Asking people to enter details for further contact could help examine what numbers of downloads and visits to a site mean. Social media highlighted the existence of the Centre and its work; however, evaluation of evidence of impact from social media was not done. Tweets by Twitter users could be analysed for number, type of user, likes and dislikes to gauge reach and impact. Involvement and contribution of public members was possible within all the WCEC review and knowledge mobilisation processes despite the rapid nature of the work.
Publication of reports	During the pandemic a delay of even 3 days would often not have been acceptable. It was essential to provide stakeholders with a watermarked (confidential) report prior to final editing and publication. Publishing in the WCEC library was immediate and could assist referencing in Welsh Government reports. Initially reports were hosted on the WCEC website and made accessible to view and download. However, if publishing in this way, reports do not have an individual identifier number (doi) so may not be picked by a Google search or search of published evidence resources. Additionally, when trying to publish the review in a peer-reviewed journal the reports can be identified by a journal’s plagiarism software, which precludes the peer-reviewed publication. Publishing on pre-print servers was relatively rapid (3–7 days) and many journals accept publications previously available in this way. The reports also received a unique doi number and the preprint servers collect metrics including views, downloads, reference in policy documents and social media references i.e., in Twitter. When producing rapid reviews, the requirements and criteria of peer reviewed journals and the research and impact requirements of academia should be considered. Our review methodology is aligned to recognised rapid review methodology and a number of the reviews have now been published in peer reviewed journals [23].