This past fall, I had the pleasure of speaking with professor Masahiro Minami from Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Education about the impact implementation science has had on mobilizing his clinical counseling and mental health services-research work in Rwanda.

Implementation science is the study of methods that promote the systematic uptake of evidence-informed interventions into practice to help improve health services and care. Minami describes implementation science as “starting in the opposite direction” of typical research.

Minami begins by connecting deeply with the community he’s working with to identify the problem or issue, then leverages his clinical experience to begin formulating solutions, and finally he explores empirical evidence to refine and inform the intervention, which is then brought back to the community to review and test.

Minami explains that this approach to implementation science is important because “some problems can’t wait.”

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