• Karen Lee, Adrian Bauman, Luke Wolfenden, Philayrath Phongsavan, and Melanie Crane.
• Sydney School of Public Health, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia; Charles Perkins Centre, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia; The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, Level 3, 30C Wentworth Street, Glebe, NSW 2037, Australia. Electronic address: karen.c.lee@sydney.edu.au.
• Prev Med. 2024 Aug 1; 185: 108012108012.

ObjectiveThe scale-up of evidence-based interventions is necessary to reverse high rates of obesity. However, scale-up doesn't occur frequently nor in a timely manner. While it has been estimated that takes 14-17 years for research translation to occur, the time taken to scale-up prevention interventions is largely unknown. This study examined the time taken to scale-up obesity prevention interventions across four scale-up pathways.MethodsA sample of obesity prevention interventions that had been scaled-up or implemented at scale were found using a structured search strategy. Included interventions were mapped against four scale-up pathways and timeframes associated with each stage of the scale-up pathway were identified to determine the time taken to scale-up.ResultsOf the 90 interventions found that were scaled-up to at least a city-wide level, less than half reported a comprehensive research pathway to scale-up and a third did not report any evidence of efficacy or effectiveness prior to scale-up. The time taken to scale-up ranged from 0 to 5 years depending on the pathway taken. Those following a comprehensive pathway took approximately 5 years to scale-up, while interventions that had only one evidence generating step took between 1 and 1.5 years to scale-up. For the remaining interventions, scale-up occurred immediately post-development without evidence generation.ConclusionsOur findings indicate that the scale-up of obesity prevention interventions can occur more quickly than previous estimates of 14-17 years. Our findings support previous research that scale-up of interventions occurs through a variety of pathways and often scale-up occurs in absence of prior evidence of effectiveness.Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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