The Judge Baker Children’s Center (JBCC) up in Boston are among the leaders in evidence-based support and implementation. Starting about 6ish years ago, I began to work with them around how readiness tools could be used to support evidence-based technical assistance and implementation. JBCC has been applying a readiness lens across multiple projects in New England.

Last December, the JBCC team led a poster presentation at NIH’s annual dissemination and implementation conference. I posted the full poster below, but wanted to focus in on a specific set of results in the poster’s mise en scène.

There are two constructs to focus on. Climate can be thought of as the temperature of an organization; the morale and general satisfaction of employments. Earlier this week, I talked about compassion fatigue, especially as it related to COVID and the persistent stress and pressures that people are under. Again, this is coming up a lot in the ECHO work, for good and understandable reasons. The core idea is that a positive climate is important for implementation.

Implementation Climate Supports is a legacy name for what I now call, “Supportive Climate.” This is whether or not there are policies and processes in place to support a specific innovation. This can also includes whether sufficient time has been budgeted for a change effort. John Kotter ( I think*) wrote about how change efforts should take no more than 10% of an individuals’ overall work effort; so about 4 hours a week. Regardless, it is critically important, supported by this research, to have a systems and supports in place for implementation.

So, this is just a sliver of the findings. Download the full poster at the button below, and don’t hesitate to reach out to Dr. Rachel Kim at JBCC for further questions (her email is on the poster).