Abstract
Complex behaviour change interventions are not well described; when they are described, the terminology used is inconsistent. This constrains scientific replication, and limits the subsequent introduction of successful interventions. Implementation Science is introducing a policy of initially encouraging and subsequently requiring the scientific reporting of complex behaviour change interventions.
Highlights
Interventions aren't described Few published intervention evaluations refer to formal documentation describing the content and delivery of an intervention and are seldom reported by researchers or practitioners in enough detail to replicate them [5,6]
Knowing the details and functional relationships are critical to any future introduction and scale-up of effective interventions
Twenty-six multidisciplinary researchers attending a workshop were presented with a set of behavioural or pharmacological intervention protocols, and asked whether they had sufficient information to be able to deliver them in practice settings
Summary
The scientific reporting of complex behaviour change interventions is an idea whose time has come; there is no reason not to do this. With the advent of Open Access publishing and the possibility of publishing supplementary material on the web, journals should require a detailed intervention protocol to be made available as a pre-requisite to the publication of a report of an intervention evaluation. Copyright and intellectual property rights are put forward as reasons for not publishing details of their intervention protocols and manuals. This is an ethical and political issue for the scientific community. We welcome Implementation Science's new policy (Appendix) of requiring authors to make, or to have made, available intervention protocols when submitting intervention studies and to report interventions, guided by Davidson et al.'s characteristics (see above) and based on the WIDER Recommendations to Improve Reporting of the Content of Behaviour Change Interventions http://interventionde sign.co.uk. The editorial policy of Implementation Science is one step in this direction; seeking agreement from other journals to introduce similar policies will be essential to the strengthening of our science and enhancing the impact of its findings
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