Implementation science
The study of how to get proven interventions actually adopted, delivered, and sustained in real-world settings.
What it means
Implementation science is the field devoted to closing the gap between what works in research and what is done in practice, studying the methods that promote uptake of evidence-based interventions into routine policy, clinical, and organizational settings. It examines implementation outcomes — acceptability, adoption, feasibility, fidelity, reach, cost, and sustainability — distinct from the clinical outcomes of the intervention itself, and uses frameworks like RE-AIM, NPT, and CFIR to diagnose barriers and facilitators. Its premise is that a brilliant intervention that no one delivers faithfully helps no one, so the 'how to deliver' is a scientific problem in its own right. The risk is a proliferation of overlapping frameworks and jargon. It matters because most evidence dies in the translational gap, and this field is the discipline built specifically to keep it alive.
Examples
A guideline shown to cut surgical infections still spreads only when implementation science identifies the workflow, training, and incentive barriers blocking surgeons from following it.
A reading programme that shone in a trial reaches three hundred schools with no training time and half the sessions delivered. The curriculum was never the problem; the delivery was.
Bed nets prevent malaria only if households hang them every night, so the real research question becomes supply routes, local messengers and habits — not the net, which already works.
First described in Health-services research field (2000s).