Life situation and mortality among former forensic psychiatric patients.

Implementation Science (IS) theories, models, and frameworks (TMFs) have been identified as one of 10 key ingredients of successful IS proposals (). They serve as a critical backbone of IS research projects, providing guidance on refining our research questions, determining what study designs and measures we select, specifying mechanisms of change, guiding hypotheses we test, and organizing data analysis, interpretation, and presentation and dissemination of findings (). There are many IS TMFs to choose from, with varying and often overlapping foci and constructs. Recent reviews have identified more than 150 separate TMFs (). A meaningful use of IS TMFs requires multiple steps and includes (1) decisions around TMF(s) to use, (2) potentially combining multiple TMFs, (3) adapting, and (4) operationalizing TMFs as appropriate to the study's context. One of the most critical steps in operationalizing IS TMFs is to link them to appropriate qualitative and/or quantitative assessment approaches and instruments (, ). Appropriate linkage of assessment instruments to constructs in IS TMFs is essential for the systematic measurement of IS concepts across studies. However, identifying relevant assessment instruments and linking them to the IS TMF can be a daunting task, especially to those who are new to the field of IS, and failure to link a TMF to an assessment of its constructs is a frequent criticism of grant applications (, –). A structured, curated, easy-to-use inventory of both quantitative and qualitative IS assessment instruments (surveys, quantitative measures, scales, tracking forms, observational forms, etc.) would be of considerable benefit to the field and would facilitate efforts toward collecting common data elements (, 2015). Historically, two measurement repositories were widely used by IS researchers—Grid Enabled Measures (GEM) and the Society for Implementation Research Collaboration (SIRC). However, these have either changed significantly or are no longer publicly accessible. Currently available assessment instrument repositories have multiple shortcomings, including not being publicly available or free, limiting their focus to a subset of IS constructs, settings, or conditions, and not allowing for direct linkage to constructs from a broad set of TMFs (, , , , ). The development of the Assess section—now included in the D&I Models Webtool, a repository and tool to plan, select, adapt, combine, and assess D&I TMFs—was motivated not only by a specific gap in available tools but also by broader concerns about the state of IS measurement infrastructure. The field has long struggled with fragmented, inaccessible, and narrowly scoped measurement resources. The discontinuation and restructuring of widely used repositories such as GEM and SIRC has left researchers, particularly those new to the field, without a reliable, publicly available home for implementation assessment instruments. More fundamentally, even when repositories existed, they were rarely designed to connect instruments to the theoretical constructs that motivate their use. As a result, IS studies introduce TMFs in their conceptual framing but fail to operationalize those frameworks through aligned measurement, a gap that reviewers and methodologists have consistently identified as a critical weakness in the field.