Abstract
This MD thesis presents health services research conducted by an academic general practitioner. It spans a 20 year period (2002 – 2022) and was carried out in the United Kingdom (Universities of Leicester and Birmingham and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence – NICE) and Aotearoa New Zealand (University of Otago). The research focus is how to get evidence into practice and thereby change clinical practice and health care delivery.
The collection of works (28 publications) that constitute this thesis are organised into five thematically linked groups: advancing the methods of clinical guideline development; clinical guidelines implementation; clinical guidelines, primary health care and multimorbidity; getting evidence into practice in Otago and Southland and using implementation science in health delivery research.
Changing clinical practice and health care delivery is a complex activity. Implementation is now regarded as a science and implementation theories, models or frameworks are increasingly used to better understand how and why implementation succeeds or fails in different health care contexts. This collection of works charts one clinician researcher’s journey along this path: from clinical guidelines to implementation science.