Unpacking the Black Box of Implementation: The Next Generation for Policy, Research and Practice

Excerpt

It was, as best as we can recall, a late spring afternoon and the three of us were completing another of our semi-regular phone calls. As each of us is directing NIMH-funded Services Research Centers related to children’s mental health research, we often sought each other’s advice and feedback on the direction of our work. We saw the complementarity of our work: We all focused on low income and largely inner city populations; we all focused on schools and community agencies; we all focused on improving effective services via training, consultation, and fitting effective practices into natural community ecologies. We all brought different strengths: Nick’s work on specific evidence-based preventive services and their installation with fidelity; Marc’s work on building onto existing naturalistic supports in schools and agencies, rather than superimposing packaged practices; and Kimberly’s work on studying feasible and practical implementation strategies that can be adopted widely by states and healthcare systems. …