Building implementation capacity in health care and welfare through team training\u2014study protocol of a longitudinal mixed-methods evaluation of the building implementation capacity intervention

Hanna Augustsson,Mårten Åhström,Henna Hasson,Leif Eriksson,Annika Bäck,Veronica-Aurelia Costea,Anna Bergström

doi:10.1186/s43058-021-00233-7

Hanna Augustsson, Mårten Åhström + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s43058-021-00233-7

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Abstract

BackgroundTo ensure the provision of high-quality safety and cost-effective health and welfare services, managers and professionals are required to introduce and ensure the routine use of clinical guidelines and other evidence-based interventions. Despite this, they often lack training and support in implementation. This project aims to investigate how a team training intervention, with the goal to build implementation capacity, influences participants’ implementation knowledge and skills, as well as how it influences implementation activities and implementation capacity within participating health and welfare organizations. Furthermore, the aim is to investigate how the organizations’ contexts influence the intervention outcomes.MethodsThe building implementation capacity (BIC) intervention builds on the behavior change wheel, which considers implementation as a matter of behavior change. The intervention will be provided to teams of managers and professionals working in health and welfare organizations and seeking support to implement a guideline- or evidence-based intervention. The intervention consists of a series of interactive workshops that provides the participating teams with the knowledge and skills to apply a systematic implementation model. A longitudinal mixed-methods evaluation, including interviews, surveys, and document analysis, will be applied over 24 months. The normalization process theory measure will be used to assess how the intervention influences implementation activities in practice and implementation capacity in the teams and the wider organizations.DiscussionThis project has an ambition to add to the knowledge concerning how to promote the uptake of research findings into health care by building implementation capacity through team training in implementation. The project’s uniqueness is that it is designed to move beyond individual-level outcomes and evaluate implementation activities and implementation capacity in participating organizations. Further, the intervention will be evaluated over 24 months to investigate long-term outcomes of implementation training.

Highlights

To ensure the provision of high-quality safety and cost-effective health and welfare services, manag‐ ers and professionals are required to introduce and ensure the routine use of clinical guidelines and other evidencebased interventions
To ensure high-quality, safety, and cost-effectiveness of services delivered by health and welfare organizations, managers and professionals are continuously required to implement changes, such as introducing and ensuring the routine use of clinical guidelines and other evidence-based interventions (EBIs)
Profound evaluation will include 10 purposively selected organizations. These selected organizations will serve as case studies and provide a better understanding of how the building implementation capacity (BIC) intervention works in different organizations, for example, in health care versus social service, in large versus small organizations, and at organizations working on a more strategic level versus those working more practice-oriented

Summary

Introduction

To ensure the provision of high-quality safety and cost-effective health and welfare services, manag‐ ers and professionals are required to introduce and ensure the routine use of clinical guidelines and other evidencebased interventions. They often lack training and support in implementation. To ensure high-quality, safety, and cost-effectiveness of services delivered by health and welfare organizations, managers and professionals are continuously required to implement changes (i.e., continuously achieving sustainable change in routine practice), such as introducing and ensuring the routine use of clinical guidelines and other evidence-based interventions (EBIs). A need for capacity-building interventions aimed at professionals and managers has been identified [10, 11]

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