In January 2024, co-principal investigators Melanie Livet, PhD, and Caryn Ward, PhD, launched a two-year project, “Transforming Implementation Practice in Early Childhood through the Development of a Professional Learning Program to support Practitioners' Implementation Capabilities.” This undertaking is a partnership between Reach Out and Read in North Carolina and South Carolina and the National Implementation Research Network (NIRN) at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (FPG) where Senior Research Scientist Ward serves as director and Implementation Scientist Livet is the implementation research lead.
 
Reach Out and Read is a national early literacy organization that works directly with pediatric care providers to share the lifelong benefits resulting from families reading aloud to their children every day. The project is designed to support the development of early childhood practitioners’ and clinicians’ ability to get children ready for kindergarten by improving implementation capacity of the Reach Out and Read intervention delivered in primary care and pediatric clinics. The project team will create a professional learning scope and sequence program on best practice implementation for early childhood practitioners and clinicians. This program will be available to all of Reach Out and Read’s program managers in the Carolinas.
 
Subsequently, the team will support and test the application of the knowledge and skills gained through the program by having the program managers assist with implementation of Reach Out and Read in four to five health clinics in Chatham, Orange, and Wake Counties in North Carolina. This project may demonstrate whether the availability of an accessible professional learning scope and sequence program has the potential to accelerate workforce development and use of implementation practices for early childhood interventions in clinical settings.
 

“This is an exciting opportunity to tailor NIRN’s implementation frameworks, tools, and processes for use in clinical settings while testing ways to scale implementation science knowledge across the multidisciplinary workforce working with children and families,” says Livet.

The researchers began their six-month planning phase in January during which they are creating lessons for the professional learning scope and sequence while recruiting clinics interested in participating. July through September will find the team in a readiness phase when they will work with the Reach Out and Read program managers to provide assistance to the clinics in preparation for delivery of the intervention. A nine-month implementation phase will be followed by data analysis and program dissemination.
 
The data analysis will focus on assessing increases in implementation knowledge and skills of Reach Out and Read staff, as well as on the successful application of this knowledge in their implementation work with the clinics. Knowledge surveys, intervention fidelity measures, and other implementation outcomes designed to evaluate implementation quality of Reach Out and Read in the participating clinics will be used as data sources. The researchers wish to make sure that by increasing implementation capacity, program managers can optimize their ability to assist the clinics, thereby enhancing fidelity to the intervention and maximizing potential impact for the families involved.

Reach Out and Read will be the first audience for data dissemination to meet the organization’s desire to scale this program across their regions. The insights from this project will also help refine the capacity building strategies needed to prepare early childhood practitioners’ work with clinical settings to integrate early childhood interventions.

Livet hopes that this project will also help NIRN refine its implementation systems for use in health care and public health arenas, while accelerating workforce development in the use of implementation practices. “This is an exciting opportunity to tailor NIRN’s implementation frameworks, tools, and processes for use in clinical settings while testing ways to scale implementation science knowledge across the multidisciplinary workforce working with children and families,” says Livet.