Medical research allows for continued innovation and can increase the quality of life of people in our community with data showing that patients in hospitals where research is conducted tend to have better health outcomes (Gehrke et al., 2019). The Ontario Hospital Association, whose membership includes all hospitals in Ontario, specifies that the province has 17 Academic Hospitals (directly associated with Medical Schools with strong teaching and research mandates) and 103 non-Academic Hospitals: 47 Community Hospitals (many of which are affiliated with Medical Schools and have teaching mandates) and 56 Small Hospitals (those generally without specific teaching/research mandates) (Ontario Hospital Association, n.d.). Although Windsor-Essex has a satellite campus of the Schulich School of Medicine at the University of Windsor, the region is serviced by community hospitals and a post-acute hospital, neither of which are academic hospitals (i.e., where medical doctors have protected time for research).

For health research capacity to increase in our province and country, research out of Community Hospitals needs to be supported. Previous survey-based research identified several barriers, such as lack of experience, funding, time, and infrastructure, to translating research into practice in Windsor-Essex (Senecal et al, 2021). Continued evaluation, including data collection beyond survey methodology, will enable us to better understand the barriers as well as the facilitators to conducting research in a community-based hospital, and inform how services available in Windsor-Essex can be improved to ensure that research is supported. This study will collect and analyze this information using online 30-minute semi-structured interviews.