Background: Practitioner research is research designed, undertaken and interpreted by practitioners and professionals, rather than by academics or ‘professional' researchers. It is a research approach often used in areas such as social care. Whilst the use of participatory and user research, and evaluation are now commonly used in evidence reviews, the role of practitioner research is less well understood.

Objectives:
• to assess the use of practitioner research in social-care guidelines; and,
• to explore the challenges of using practitioner research in systematic reviews and guidelines.

Methods: We assessed all included studies from a sample of social-care guidelines to assess the use of practitioner research as evidence. We used criteria as defined in the SSCR review (1), to assess each included study from the abstract and evidence table.

We also explored how practitioner research would be identified, assessed and used in standard evidence review and guideline processes.

Results: We will present an assessment of the use of practitioner research in guidelines. The SSCR review identified a number of challenges with practitioner research; this included the challenges of publishing such research and the types of methods used. In practice, such research is therefore likely to be less represented in standard databases and may be considered of ‘lower quality’ when assessed using approaches such as GRADE. We selected a number of studies from the SSCR review and determined if they were indexed in standard databases and quality assessed them using GRADE.

Conclusions: Practitioner research can provide evidence for use in systematic reviews; however, it can be harder to identify and often assessed as low quality. The value of practitioner research may be of particular relevance when considering contextual and implementation issues, and barriers to service change.

1. Practitioner research in social care: a review and recommendations. Ian Shaw, Neil Lunt and Fiona Mitchell. School for Social Care Research; Methods Review 18, 2016