Featured Resource: Special Issue: Strengthening the Science and Practice of Implementation Support
By Dr. Jonathan A. Caballero, Strategic Operations Advisor
3-min read
At TCI, we highly value evidence, and as you know, we love to support changemakers in achieving success in implementing evidence-based initiatives across diverse areas. We believe it's crucial to fully explore and understand the impact of assessing the current evidence on implementation support and technical assistance.
With this in mind, we want to share with you a special featured resource this month. The Special Issue of Evaluation & the Health Professions Journal: “Strengthening the Science and Practice of Implementation Support: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Training and Technical Assistance Centers”
Although normally behind a paywall, the full text will be accessible as an open-access offering until October 20, 2024. So, be sure to take a look at it and share it with your colleagues while it is open access!
The Special Issue
The 2-volume special issue explores evidence and examples of quality implementation support. To do so, it focuses on the latest knowledge and innovations in the field of evaluating organizations providing technical assistance and support for implementation.
There has been increased funding and reliance on organizations that provide training and technical assistance to support other organizations in implementing evidence-based initiatives (something that we are so happy to see!).
However, a keen observation – and one of the main motivations for producing this special issue – is that the evidence base underlying the activities that organizations providing implementation support seems less clear. For example, there is a relative scarcity of evaluation studies of implementation supports, which leads to difficulty in understanding what are the best ways to produce outcomes.
Maximizing the Impact of Implementation Support Through Evaluation Research
The premise of this issue is that if we expect a strong evidence base for our initiatives, we should also expect it from the training and technical support offered by our implementation support infrastructure. Whether you are directly implementing an evidence-based initiative or you are either receiving or offering support to other organizations or teams that are implementing them, understanding what constitutes good implementation support can be a major asset.
Depending on your role, this can be useful for assessing a prospective organization to support your team, enhance your support practices, or even as a consideration and planning support for activities such as spreading and scaling. We often observe this situation when teams that initially lead an implementation of an initiative in a certain context but suddenly intend to spread it and scale across sites or contexts and may become the go-to team and expert about both the initiative and how to implement it.
The special issue highlight frameworks that we commonly discuss at TCI, such as the Interactive System Framework and the Evidence-based system for implementation support.
In addition, contributors to the special issue were asked to provide recommendations and takeaways that could improve the effectiveness of training and implementation support activities, as well as recommendations on how to move forward both the practice and theory underlying implementation support – information relevant for those in implementation support roles.
We invite you to take a look at the special issue and to keep striving to provide high-quality implementation support!
This article was featured in our monthly Implementation in Action bulletin! Want to receive our next issue? Subscribe here.