Moving Evidence to Action: A Strategy to Support the Implementation of Comprehensive Violence Prevention Efforts

Abstract

For public health agencies, the pragmatic need to bring together science and practice to affect public health outcomes manifests in the implementation of prevention strategies with the best available evidence. Knowledge translation makes scientific findings understandable to the knowledge user, often through synthesis of the best available evidence. Implementation science promotes the adoption and integration of evidence through prevention strategies implemented within various contexts. Working together, knowledge translation and implementation science can promote the uptake and advancement of scientific and practice-based evidence for strategies that will have the greatest impact across a variety of contexts. Violence Prevention in Practice (VPP) is an online resource designed to help practitioners select, adapt, implement, and evaluate multiple prevention strategies included in five technical packages developed by Centers for Disease Control’s Division of Violence Prevention. A technical package translates the best available evidence into a core set of prevention strategies intended to be broadly implemented. VPP supports communities in using the technical package strategies in combination, drawing on key implementation science principles. In this article, we explain the process for developing VPP and provide a framework that can be used to develop similar guidance in other health promotion areas. The framework explains how both general components, such as selection and adaptation, come together with strategy-specific implementation guidance. Distinct from typical planning models, VPP is not designed as a linear stepwise process, and it allows practitioners to use one or more components alone, as well as helps practitioners link across components as needed.