Planning for implementation: why who and how

Implementation planning is the crucial work done in advance and throughout to maximize intervention uptake and reduce risk of failure. Effective planning for implementation takes a team. Implementation planning is relevant not only to the healthcare professionals, health promotion practitioners, policymakers, and administrators who are tasked with the adoption of programs or policies but also to the epidemiologists and public health and healthcare researchers responsible for designing, testing and comparing interventions and programs for efficacy and effectiveness. If effectiveness researchers want to get their evidence-based interventions into practice, then they need to think beyond “Does it work?" and start to think about the challenges implementation practitioners face and ask, “Will it work here?" This means thinking beyond the carefully controlled research setting to consider how conditions, resources, and policies might impact the delivery of their intervention in the real world of public health and healthcare delivery and to engage and clarify roles with key stakeholders early in the implementation process. Fortunately, the policymakers and implementation practitioners who are involved in selecting and making decisions about real-world use of interventions, programs, and guidelines now have considerable resources available to help them select the most appropriate evidence-based intervention and plan for implementation within a particular setting.