Implementation strategies: recommendations for specifying and reporting

By Enola K. Proctor, Byron J. Powell, J. Curtis McMillen. Implementation Science, 2013

2,035 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Implementation strategies have unparalleled importance in implementation science, as they constitute the ‘how to’ component of changing healthcare practice. Yet, implementation researchers and other stakeholders are not able to fully utilize the findings of studies focusing on implementation strategies because they are often inconsistently labelled and poorly described, are rarely justified theoretically, lack operational definitions or manuals to guide their use, and are part of ‘packaged’ approaches whose specific elements are poorly understood. We address the challenges of specifying and reporting implementation strategies encountered by researchers who design, conduct, and report research on implementation strategies. Specifically, we propose guidelines for naming, defining, and operationalizing implementation strategies in terms of seven dimensions: actor, the action, action targets, temporality, dose, implementation outcomes addressed, and theoretical justification. Ultimately, implementation strategies cannot be used in practice or tested in research without a full description of their components and how they should be used. As with all intervention research, their descriptions must be precise enough to enable measurement and ‘reproducibility.’ We propose these recommendations to improve the reporting of implementation strategies in research studies and to stimulate further identification of elements pertinent to implementation strategies that should be included in reporting guidelines for implementation strategies.

Subfields: General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/68bffe0075c14ccf625a666aea2891c63262f1b3

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In General Health Professions

Citations in the corpus

From Classification to Causality: Advancing Understanding of Mechanisms of Change in Implementation Science (2018, background): “Underspecified strategies also leave the field vulnerable to inappropriately synthesizing data across studies (24, 25).”
The Implementation Research Logic Model: a method for planning, executing, reporting, and synthesizing implementation projects (2020, methodology): “Providing the theoretical or conceptual reasoning for strategy selection is recommended [9].”
Methods to Improve the Selection and Tailoring of Implementation Strategies (2017, positive): “Proctor and colleagues(3) have suggested reporting guidelines for implementation strategies that require researchers to carefully name, conceptually define, and operationalize strategies, and specify them according to features such as (a) the actor, (b) the action, (c) action target, (d) temporality”
Making sense of complexity in context and implementation: the Context and Implementation of Complex Interventions (CICI) framework (2017, background): “Implementation strategies should be named, preferably according to the literature in order to identify similar efforts [83], and should be described in terms of their components [83].”
Use of concept mapping to characterize relationships among implementation strategies and assess their feasibility and importance: results from the Expert Recommendations for Implementing Change (ERIC) study (2015, background): “The science and practice of implementation would be greatly facilitated by a parsimonious nomenclature of conceptually distinct implementation strategies [2, 4–7].”
A refined compilation of implementation strategies: results from the Expert Recommendations for Implementing Change (ERIC) project (2015, methodology): “Taken together, these two deficiencies complicate the acquisition and interpretation of knowledge, preclude research syntheses such as systematic reviews and meta-analyses, limit replication in both research and practice, and ultimately stymie the translation and application of empirical studies tha”
RE-AIM Planning and Evaluation Framework: Adapting to New Science and Practice With a 20-Year Review (2019, background): “First, there have been recent calls to more explicitly describe strategies and context (80, 81) as well as test mediating relationships between implementation strategies and implementation outcomes (82).”
Enhancing the Impact of Implementation Strategies in Healthcare: A Research Agenda (2019, methodology): “guidelines (4) can be adapted and applied to prospectively track strategy use over the course of an”