Diffusion of Innovations in Practice (DIP)

 

          Principal Investigator:  Peter Hovmand, PhD, PI

          Funder: CMHSR funded pilot through NIMH - R24 MH50857

          Timeframe: 07/04-12/04

          Affiliation: Center for Mental Health Services Research (CMHSR)

Project Staff: Enola Proctor, PhD, Co-PI; Aaron Rosen, PhD, Co-PI; Kraig Knudsen, PhD, Investigator; Nicole Fedoravicius, MPH, Specialist; Brian Perron, MSW and NIMH predoctoral trainee, Investigator.

Participating Organizations:

Project Contact:   Peter Hovmand, PhD, PI, 314-935-7968

                              phovmand@wustl.edu 

 

Project Update as of 4/22/05:
Stage: Completed

 

Description: The overall goal of this pilot study is to understand how administrators in social service organizations approach the problem of implementing innovations such as evidence-based practices (EBP) with the ultimate goal being increasing social workers correct use of EBP with clients. Using key informant interviews with agency directors and administrators, the study seeks to clarify participants’ concept of EBP, perspectives on the problems associated with trying to implement practice innovations, influences on the process of transmission and introduction of new practices, use of information technologies, and treatment areas that are a high priority for the agency.  As detailed below, the pilot will contribute to the preparation of an R34 intervention development application to the NIMH, focused on strategies to support the dissemination and implementation of evidence-based psychosocial practices in mental health agencies.

 

Background: Any effort at increasing social workers use of EBP within an agency presupposes a stock of workers who have the necessary skills and intentions to implement EBP with clients. Agencies that want to provide the very best services will attend to this explicitly through a deliberate intervention or training program, as opposed to assuming that workers will come into the agency with the required skills or acquire them informally through supervision or agency culture. This is not to argue that supervision and agency culture are unimportant, but to argue that in order to achieve the highest standards of services, agencies must have a deliberate and explicit procedure for training and motivating workers to use EBP with their clients. As such, it becomes imperative to develop and empirically test such intervention and training strategies.

 

Focusing on increasing individual social workers’ capacities and motivation to deliver EBP assumes that the problem resides primarily in the worker and can be isolated from agency and other confounding issues such as the type of agency, location of agency, budget, accessibility to ESTs, organizational pressures, funding streams, availability of appropriate decision support tools, local availability of trained social workers, demographics of client populations, etc. More specifically, designing and testing an implementation intervention presupposes a specific problem formulation that may or may not be empirically supported by local agencies’ accounts of trying to implement EBP. As such, it becomes imperative to first identify and define the problems facing local agencies in trying to implement innovative practices.

 

Conference Presentations: