A New Framework for Developing and Evaluating Complex Interventions

Summary

The UK Medical Research Council’s guide to evaluating complex interventions, rewritten in 2021, moves beyond the “binary question of effectiveness”. Interventions become “events in systems”, shaped by context and able to backfire elsewhere, so researchers should ask the questions “most useful to decision makers rather than those that can be answered with greater certainty”.

Rationale

We take heart that the Medical Research Council now asks how context shapes an intervention. Our imagined portfolio asks much the same: “what seems particular to a place or practice?”