The World Health Organization (WHO) has developed such templates to help health professionals document important details of implementation, context, and impact to support effective replication and scale-up. For example, the WHO Guide to Identifying and Documenting Best Practices outlines the types of information that health officials need when considering replicating a best practice. In addition, the WHO Programme Reporting Standards for Sexual, Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health (SRMNCAH) provides guidance to program implementers and researchers on how to report complete and accurate details on the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation processes of SRMNCAH programs.
The new Knowledge SUCCESS “What Works” template
What we heard during our co-creation workshops is that the missing piece of the puzzle is to package those details in a way that’s easy for health professionals to digest and put into practice. Our new “What Works” series aims to fill this gap. We adapted the templates from the two seminal WHO guidance documents noted above to describe what was done, when, where, how, and by whom. Important details about program experiences are presented in short, visual, and useful tidbits which can be consumed in under a minute. Breaking down a comprehensive program document into these pieces of “microcontent” allows readers to explore the details at their own pace. Readers can also quickly navigate to key aspects that they are interested in learning more about, for example:
- Background to learn about the context,
- Intervention to learn about how the program was implemented,
- Results to find out about impact, or
- Key Implications for lessons learned and information about sustainability, scale-up, and adaptability.
Traditionally, documents that explore program details are shared in a lengthy PDF format, with lots of text and figures. Readers are presented with all the information at once. Behavioral science tells us this can be overwhelming and ultimately result in inaction. We address this overwhelm issue by presenting the information in interactive, easily-consumable chunks.