BACKGROUND Initiatives to accelerate the adoption and implementation of evidence-based practices benefit from an association with influential individuals and organizations. When opinion leaders advocate or adopt a best practice, others adopt too, resulting in diffusion. We sought to identify existing influence throughout Canada's long-term care sector and the extent to which informal advice-see...

Title:Strategies to implement evidence into practice to improve palliative care: recommendations of a nominal group approach with expert opinion leaders

Opinion formation and innovation diffusion have gained lots of attention in the last decade due to its application in social and political science. Control of the diffusion process usually takes place using the most influential people in the society, called opinion leaders or key players. But the opinion leaders can hardly be accessed or hired for spreading the desired opinion or information. T...

BACKGROUND Using opinion leaders to accelerate the dissemination of evidence-based public health practices is a promising strategy for closing the gap between evidence and practice. Network interventions (using social network data to accelerate behavior change or improve organizational performance) are a promising but under-explored strategy. We aimed to use mobile phone technology to rapidly a...

Several recent studies explore how American politicians represent the policy views of subconstituencies within the electorate. We extend this perspective to 12 West European democracies over the period 1973–2002 to examine how mainstream parties responded to electoral subconstituencies. We find that parties were highly responsive to the views of opinion leaders, i.e., citizens who regularly eng...

Introduction / objectives Compliance of hand hygiene is frequently less than optimal and heavily depends on the dedication of the key opinion leaders. There are few tools to support their role model for hand hygiene. Dedicated days, information campaigns and similar activities lead to tremendous, but short-lived impact on the hand hygiene compliance. Psychological studies have shown, that a pub...