Implementation and dissemination research: the time has come!

In a provocative statement in a very recent issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Kessler and Glasgow have called for a 10-year moratorium on effi cacy randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in health and health services research. The authors argue that much intervention research has had minimal impact on both policy and practice because the very nature of effi cacy studies means that focus has had to be on a limited number of specifi c causal and preventive factors; this ignores both the complexity of real-world implementation and the multilevel ecological context in which interventions need to be conducted. I have also previously discussed those same limitations as they apply to sports injury prevention studies, most recently as part of my keynote address at the 2011 International Olympic Committee World Conference on The Prevention of Injury and Illness in Sport, to be published in a forthcoming issue of BJSM.