Scaling up evidence-based interventions is necessary to achieve public health goals, including substance use prevention and treatment. This study aims to identify success factors and barriers to effectively scale up public health interventions.
Results show that Key success factors are: (1) establishing monitoring and evaluation systems, costing and economic and other modelling of intervention approaches, (2) active engagement of a range of implementers and the target community, (3) tailoring the scale-up approach to the local context and use of participatory approaches, (4) systematic use of, infrastructure to support implementation such as training, delivery systems, technical resources, strong leadership and champions, (5) well-defined scale up strategy, and (6) strong advocacy.
Barriers identified are: (1) not adapting intervention approaches to the local context, (2) intervention costs and other economic factors, (3) lack of human resources, (4) resistance to the introduction of new practices due to capacity constraints, (5) insufficient investment in implementation infrastructure including training, monitoring and evaluation systems, (6) staff recruitment and staff turnover, and (7) lack of political will.