Interactive workshop to develop implementation framework (i-PARIHS) resources to support practice facilitation

Practice facilitation is a method used to address the complexity associated with implementation of innovations into primary care. To provide support, we propose that the i-PARIHS (Integrated Promoting Action on Research Implementation in Health Services) framework could support practice facilitators. The i-PARIHS framework positions facilitation as a core element for successful implementation. Therefore, the aim of this study was to provide support to practice facilitators whilst simultaneously gaining feedback on what facilitators in practice need in regard to support with operationalising the i-PARIHS framework in practice.

This study involved the delivery of a 1-h workshop on the i-PARIHS framework at the 2018 International Conference on Practice Facilitation. The authors provided an overview of the i-PARIHS framework, how it can be used to support the facilitation of innovations into practice, and finally, attendees worked through facilitation scenarios and applied an i-PARIHS resource. At the end of the workshop, attendees were invited to participant in the research component, by completing a post-workshop survey on the workshop content and the i-PARIHS resource.

Participants were highly engaged and enthusiastic about the workshop. Participants reported that an introduction to implementation frameworks was valuable and the example of how the i-PARIHS framework had been used in a previous project was helpful. Overall, this study identifies how framework informed facilitation helped participants feel more equipped to conduct systematic facilitation and that the development of i-PARIHS resources would be helpful in their everyday work.

This study demonstrates that the existence of implementation frameworks is not sufficient to provide support to those who facilitate in the real world. The current study introduced practice facilitators to the i-PARIHS framework, and the findings demonstrate the need to develop and refine existing i-PARIHS resources to support facilitation. Specifically, the next steps stemming from this study will be to (i) continue to utilize workshops for sharing and refining tools, (ii) allocate development efforts to tools that assist with planning, (iii) focus on tool provision mechanisms that keep user-friendliness in mind, and (iv) translate the i-PARIHS facilitation checklist from academic language into more practical and user-friendly language.