No abstract

The organizational social context in which mental health services are provided is believed to affect the adoption and implementation of evidence-based practices (EBPs) as well as the quality and outcomes of the services. A fully developed science of implementation effectiveness requires conceptual models that include organizational social context and tools for assessing social context that have been tested in a broad cross-section of mental health systems. This paper describes the role of organizational social context in services and implementation research and evaluates a comprehensive contextual measure, labeled Organizational Social Context (OSC), designed to assess the key latent constructs of culture, climate and work attitudes. The psychometric properties of the OSC measure were assessed in a nationwide study of 1,154 clinicians in 100 mental health clinics with a second-order confirmatory factor analysis of clinician responses, estimates of scale reliabilities, and indices of within-clinic agreement and between-clinic differences among clinicians. Finally, the paper illustrates the use of nationwide norms in describing the OSC profiles of individual mental health clinics and examines the cross-level association of organizational-level culture and climate with clinician-level work attitudes.

The authors identify and define key aspects of the progression from research on the efficacy of a new intervention to its dissemination. They highlight the role of transportability questions that arise in that progression and illustrate key conceptual and design features that differentiate efficacy, effectiveness, and dissemination research. An ongoing study of the transportability of multisystemic therapy is used to illustrate independent and interdependent aspects of effectiveness, transportability, and dissemination studies. Variables relevant to the progression from treatment efficacy to dissemination include features of the intervention itself as well as variables pertaining to the practitioner, client, model of service delivery, organization, and service system. The authors provide examples of how some of these variables are relevant to the transportability of different types of interventions. They also discuss sample research questions, study designs, and challenges to be anticipated in the arena of transportability research.

Implementation science in mental health is informed by other academic disciplines and industries. Conceptual and methodological territory charted in psychotherapy research is pertinent to two elements of the conceptual model of implementation posited by Aarons and colleagues (2010)—implementation fidelity and innovation feedback systems. Key characteristics of scientifically validated fidelity instruments, and of the feasibility of their use in routine care, are presented. The challenges of ensuring fidelity measurement methods are both effective (scientifically validated) and efficient (feasible and useful in routine care) are identified as are examples of implementation research attempting to balance these attributes of fidelity measurement.