Scale up and institutionalization of successful practices is the goal of every pilot project. Once scaled, the goal is to sustain the intervention so that benefits proven at small scale can generate measurable health impact. Successfully navigating this pilot-to-practice journey to meet scale up and sustainability goals has been a challenge for many global health interventions. There is need for more evidence on what works to increase the likelihood of scale up and sustainability.
Based on SC4CCM’s five year experience with identifying, testing, and scaling up successful community level supply chain interventions, we identified three distinguishable stages of the journey:
- Laying the foundation for scale and institutionalization during the pilot stage;
- Transforming pilot successes into practice at scale using a strategy built on evidence from the pilot; and,
- Integrating successful practices into organizational structures so that the benefits can be realized more broadly within the health system.
Learn more about the approaches that worked across all three countries to move interventions from pilot to scale to practice and the opportunities and risks that SC4CCM identified to institutionalization and sustainability in our Pilot to Practice Brief:
Pathway to Supply Chain Sustainability Tool
SC4CCM developed the Pathway to Supply Chain Sustainability Tool to assess a country’s community health supply chain’s readiness to:
- Take a supply chain innovation to scale, and
- Institutionalize the innovation as a standard business practice
The tool also enables program and supply chain managers to develop a structured approach and comprehensive plans to identify areas that need strengthening to facilitate scale up and institutionalization.
Following midline evaluations and Ministry of Health and stakeholder endorsement of scale up packages, The Pathway to Sustainability Tool was used by stakeholders in participatory workshops in all three countries to develop action plans for scale up and institutionalization of the interventions.
Malawi sustainability workshop results
