An introduction to implementation science for the non-specialist

Steve Simon

2018-02-06

I’ve done a lot of work with Evidence-Based Health, but one big and largely unsolved problem is how to get health care professionals to change their practices once the evidence for these changes becomes obvious. If no one changes in the face of evidence, then all the effort to produce and critically appraise the evidence becomes worthless. A new field, implementation science, has been developed to get at methods to encourage the adoption of new evidence-based practices. This paper outlines how implementation science is supposed to work and offers two real world examples of implementation science studies.

Bauer, Mark S., Damschroder, Laura, Hagedorn, Hildi, Smith, Jeffrey, Kilbourne, Amy M. An introduction to implementation science for the non-specialist, BMC Psychology (2015, Sep 16), 3(1): 32. Available at https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-015-0089-9.