Diffusing and scaling evidence-based interventions: eight lessons for early child development from the implementation of perinatal home visiting in South Africa

Most low-and middle-income countries lack resources with which to implement public health programs. As such, there is a necessity to facilitate programing that judiciously makes use of what resources there are. However, despite evidence for the efficacy of many interventions, translating these into real-world effectiveness, and then into scalability, is complex and has often been neglected. We draw on a case study of Philani+ (a maternal and child health intervention implemented in South Africa) to distil eight features of health programing that aid intervention effectiveness. We argue that implementation science should turn its attention to the human resource “process” features of interventions. We describe the importance of staff selection (rigorous selection and hiring procedures); training (developing a set of common core pragmatic problem-solving skills); monitoring (feedback about quality); community and institutional support (rapport with intervention communities); the importance of stable leadership (consistent leadership focusing on how to optimize the potential of staff); the importance of implementing with sustainable, long-term change in mind; and, finally, we describe how cultivating consistency within an organization requires disciplined action and disciplined focus on the organization’s vision.