Forte grants funding to project aiming to increase implementation capacity in health and welfare organisations

“To ensure the provision of health and welfare services of high quality, safety and cost-effectiveness, managers and professionals are required to implement changes such as new methods and guidelines”, explains Anna Bergström, researcher at the Medical Management Centre (MMC) at the Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics (LIME).

“Despite this, managers and staff have little training and support in implementation.”

The project aims to investigate how implementation capacity can be built within health and welfare organisations by evaluating team training in evidence-based implementation. The Building Implementation Capacity (BIC) intervention builds on the theoretical framework Behaviour Change Wheel and considers implementation as a matter of behaviour change.

How will you proceed?

“The intervention includes teams of managers and staff working in a variety of health and welfare organisations. The intervention provides the participating teams with knowledge and skills in applying a systematic implementation model. A longitudinal mixed-methods evaluation will be applied to investigate the extent to which the intervention results in success in practical implementation and the extent to which it develops implementation capacity in the teams and the wider organisation.”

What makes this project unique?

“The uniqueness lies not only on its’s focus on the implementation of a particular method or guideline, but also evaluates the development and sustainability of implementation capacity in participating organisations. As such, this project aims to contribute to understanding how work teams can build sustainable implementation capacity, and in doing so, contributing to fulfilling the goal of the new national knowledge-based management structure.”

Which patient groups will benefit from the research and how?

“The project aims to increase the implementation of evidence-based methods for a variety of patient groups as well as other target groups in the population, for example children in pre-school, by increasing the capacity of included organizations to implement new evidence-based methods and guidelines.”

Who is taking part in the study?

The project is a collaboration between the PROCOME research group at LIME, Karolinska Institutet and the Center for epidemiology and community medicine at Region Stockholm and Uppsala University and includes Hanna Augustsson, Henna Hasson, Leif Eriksson and myself (Anna Bergström).

The project has been granted funding from Forte's targeted application for implementation research to investigate how capacity for implementation within operations in Region Stockholm can be built in order to better translate new knowledge into practice.