Building implementation capacity in health care and welfare through team training—study protocol of a longitudinal mixed-methods evaluation of the building implementation capacity intervention

BACKGROUND: To ensure the provision of high-quality safety and cost-effective health and welfare services, managers and professionals are required to introduce and ensure the routine use of clinical guidelines and other evidence-based interventions. Despite this, they often lack training and support in implementation. This project aims to investigate how a team training intervention, with the goal to build implementation capacity, influences participants’ implementation knowledge and skills, as well as how it influences implementation activities and implementation capacity within participating health and welfare organizations. Furthermore, the aim is to investigate how the organizations’ contexts influence the intervention outcomes. METHODS: The building implementation capacity (BIC) intervention builds on the behavior change wheel, which considers implementation as a matter of behavior change. The intervention will be provided to teams of managers and professionals working in health and welfare organizations and seeking support to implement a guideline- or evidence-based intervention. The intervention consists of a series of interactive workshops that provides the participating teams with the knowledge and skills to apply a systematic implementation model. A longitudinal mixed-methods evaluation, including interviews, surveys, and document analysis, will be applied over 24 months. The normalization process theory measure will be used to assess how the intervention influences implementation activities in practice and implementation capacity in the teams and the wider organizations. DISCUSSION: This project has an ambition to add to the knowledge concerning how to promote the uptake of research findings into health care by building implementation capacity through team training in implementation. The project’s uniqueness is that it is designed to move beyond individual-level outcomes and evaluate implementation activities and implementation capacity in participating organizations. Further, the intervention will be evaluated over 24 months to investigate long-term outcomes of implementation training. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s43058-021-00233-7.