To develop and field test an implementation assessment tool for assessing progress of hospital units in implementing improvements for the prevention of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) in a two-state collaborative, including data on actions implemented by participating teams and contextual factors that may influence their efforts. Using the data collected, learn how implementation actions can be improved and analyze effects of implementation progress on outcome measures.

We developed the tool as an interview protocol that included quantitative and qualitative items addressing actions on the Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP) and clinical interventions for use in guiding data collection via telephone interviews.

We conducted interviews with leaders of improvement teams from units participating in the two-state VAP prevention initiative.

We collected data from 43 hospital units as they implemented actions for the VAP initiative and performed descriptive analyzes of the data with comparisons across the 2 states.

Early in the VAP prevention initiative, most units had made only moderate progress overall in using many of the CUSP actions known to support their improvement processes. For contextual factors, a relatively small number of barriers were found to have important negative effects on implementation progress (in particular, barriers related to workload and time issues). We modified coaching provided to the unit teams to reinforce training in weak spots that the interviews identified.

These assessments provided important new knowledge regarding the implementation science of quality improvement projects, including feedback during implementation, and give a better understanding of which factors most affect implementation.