Abstract
In public health, implementation research is done to improve access to interventions that have been shown to work but have not reached many of the people who could benefit from them. Researchers identify practical problems facing public health programmes and aim to find solutions that improve health outcomes. In operational research, routinely-collected programme data are used to uncover ways of delivering more effective, efficient and equitable health care. As implementation research can address many types of questions, many research designs may be appropriate. Existing reporting guidelines partially cover the methods used in implementation and operational research, so we ran a consultation through the World Health Organization (WHO), the Alliance for Health Policy & Systems Research (AHPSR) and the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR) and developed guidelines to facilitate the funding, conduct, review and publishing of such studies. Our intention is to provide a practical reference for funders, researchers, policymakers, implementers, reviewers and editors working with implementation and operational research. This is an evolving field, so we plan to monitor the use of these guidelines and develop future versions as required.
Highlights
Implementation and operational research are growing in importance and recognition
Implementation research contributes a growing part of the evidence base used by the World Health Organization (WHO), which promotes, supports, publishes and evaluates such research
The papers have described actions taken in response to a wide variety of public health problems in many different settings, but we have found that authors often needed to be prompted to provide sufficient detail on local context, details of interventions and measures of impact
Summary
Implementation and operational research are growing in importance and recognition. Major donors, including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership, the United States of America’s National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust are increasing funding support for this research area and leading scientific journals have established sections promoting the publication of such research. Implementation research can help answer questions about why effective interventions are not reaching the people who could benefit from them.[4,5] Implementation research is useful in understanding how health system failures create barriers to the delivery of policies or programmes. A broad understanding of systems failures and their relationship to implementation barriers is a key aspect of much implementation research Resolving barriers such as non-adherence to treatment guidelines may have less to do with training providers and more to do with changing the system to allow more time or by establishing better feedback mechanisms. As the range of applications of implementation research is very broad, a wide range of different research methods may be used depending on the type of problem studied (Table 1) Existing guidelines and their extensions cover some – but not all – of the required reporting areas. The traditional structure of a scientific research article may not provide a good framework for reporting important contextual issues
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
