Drug reps may not have the best reputation, but they may have something to teach us in terms of learning about translating research into practice.

‘Who is using is using the latest behavioral science change research in hospitals?’ asked Jim Yong Kim of Harvard Medical School. Not doctors, not nurses, not health care managers – drug reps.

Drug reps, he explained, carefully record the nature of their interactions with customers and then buy prescription records to see whether those interactions have affected how doctors treat patients.

Later, Kimberley Hoagwood, from New York State Office of Mental Health and Columbia University, urged us to “instil curiosity into our systems”, by examining experimentally different strategies of engagement.

In children’s services those of us who spend much of our time working with policy makers and practitioners to develop and implement evidence-based interventions are only just beginning to get our heads around the idea that what we do – our regular activity – may itself be worthy of scientific investigation. We’ve been so focused on the doing that we may have been forgetting to learn.