Knowledge is recognized as a crucial organizational resource, which it has been suggested, increases in value through use. However, tensions exist between applying generalized scientific and academic knowledge to practice and incorporating local, experiential and tacit understanding in our knowledge base for practice. Knowledge management and transfer are frequently advocated as the means to increase service capacity within existing resource levels. In the NHS knowledge management and transfer tends to adopt a social constructivist approach, which favours the application of scientific evidence to practice, consequently the tacit and experiential knowledge of practitioners and service users is often excluded from formal knowledge-transfer processes.

This paper describes a systematic process that was used to formalize tacit nursing knowledge in child and adolescent mental health (CAMH) and link it into the pre-existing scientific and academic literature.

The paper goes on to describe how this process was modified and transferred to work with parents of children referred to CAMH services.

The paper illustrates the differing strands of pre-existing scientific and academic knowledge valued by nurses and parents. It highlights how involving service users in identifying scientific and academic knowledge that they find useful can focus attention on strands of pre-existing knowledge previously overlooked by professionals and service providers and thus enhance the value of this knowledge as an organizational resource. The paper also demonstrates how the tacit and experiential knowledge of nurses and services users can be transformed into more formalized knowledge, which can then be incorporated into organizational knowledge-transfer processes.