Achieving justice in implementation: the Lancet Commission on Evidence-Based Implementation in Global Health

With the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, global leaders committed to the health and wellbeing of every person on the planet by 2030. With the development of numerous life-saving and life-enhancing innovations, the potential for using science and technology to achieve this goal has never been greater. Yet with far too many innovations there are stark and unacceptable inequities in availability and access. Further, a high proportion of effective interventions are not being put into practice effectively at scale, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) where scalability and sustainability of interventions with quality have been especially challenging. Wide gaps remain between what is known and what is done in global health. These gaps, varyingly characterised with terms such as the knowledge to action gap, the research to practice gap, and the quality gap, are failures in implementation. Global health goals and objectives will not be achieved until these implementation challenges are effectively addressed.