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Introduction: Achieving effective community‐based primary health care requires evidence for guiding strategic decisions that must be made. However, research processes often limit data collection to particular organizational levels or disseminate results to specific audiences. Decision‐making that emerges can fail to account for the contrasting perspectives and needs of managers at each organizational level. The Ghana Health Service (GHS) addressed this problem with a multilevel and sequential research and action approach that has provided two decades of implementation learning for guiding community‐based primary health care development. Method: The GHS implementation research initiatives progressed from (i) a participatory pilot investigation to (ii) an experimental trial of strategies that emerged to (iii) replication research for testing scale‐up, culminating in (iv) evidence‐based scale‐up of a national community‐based primary health care program. A reform process subsequently repeated this sequence in a manner that involved stakeholders at the community, sub‐district, district, and regional levels of the system. The conduct, interpretation, and dissemination of results that emerged comprised a strategy for achieving systems learning by conducting investigations in phases in conjunction with bottom‐up knowledge capture, lateral exchanges for fostering peer learning at each system level, and top‐down processes for communicating results as policy. Continuous accumulation of qualitative data on stakeholder reactions to operations at each organizational level was conducted in conjunction with quantitative monitoring of field operations. Results: Implementation policies were enhanced by results associated with each phase. A quasi‐experiment for testing the reform process showed that scale‐up of community‐based primary health care was accelerated, leading to improvements in childhood survival and reduced fertility. Conclusion: Challenges to system learning were overcome despite severe resource constraints. The integration of knowledge generation with ongoing management processes institutionalized learning for achieving evidence‐driven program action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Although experimental trials often identify optimal strategies for improving community health, transferring operational innovation from well-funded research programs to resource-constrained settings often languishes. Because research initiatives are based in institutions equipped with unique resources and staff capabilities, results are often dismissed by decisionmakers as irrelevant to large-scale operations and national health policy. This article describes an initiative undertaken in Nkwanta District, Ghana, focusing on this problem. The Nkwanta District initiative is a critical link between the experimental study conducted in Navrongo, Ghana, and a national effort to scale up the innovations developed in that study. A 2002 Nkwanta district-level survey provides the basis for assessing the likelihood that the Navrongo model is replicable elsewhere in Ghana. The effect of community-based health planning and services exposure on family planning and safe-motherhood indicators supports the hypothesis that Navrongo effects are transferable to impoverished rural settings elsewhere, confirming the need for strategies to bridge the gap between Navrongo evidence-based innovation and national health-sector reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]