Ten years of implementation outcome research: a scoping review protocol

INTRODUCTION: A 2011 paper proposed a working taxonomy of implementation outcomes, their conceptual distinctions and a two-pronged research agenda on their role in implementation success. Since then, over 1100 papers citing the manuscript have been published. Our goal is to compare the field’s progress to the originally proposed research agenda, and outline recommendations for the next 10 years. To accomplish this, we are conducting the proposed scoping review. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: Our approach is informed by Arksey and O’Malley’s methodological framework for conducting scoping reviews. We will adhere to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews. We first aim to assess the degree to which each implementation outcome has been investigated in the literature, including healthcare settings, clinical populations and innovations represented. We next aim to describe the relationship between implementation strategies and outcomes. Our last aim is to identify studies that empirically assess relationships among implementation and/or service and client outcomes. We will use a forward citation tracing approach to identify all literature that cited the 2011 paper in the Web of Science (WOS) and will supplement this with citation alerts sent to the second author for a 6-month period coinciding with the WOS citation search. Our review will focus on empirical studies that are designed to assess at least one of the identified implementation outcomes in the 2011 taxonomy and are published in peer-reviewed journals. We will generate descriptive statistics from extracted data and organise results by these research aims. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: No human research participants will be involved in this review. We plan to share findings through a variety of means including peer-reviewed journal publications, national conference presentations, invited workshops and webinars, email listservs affiliated with our institutions and professional associations, and academic social media.