Table 1 Overview of the themes identified through the systematic scoping review

Preferences for evidence

Organisational roles

External pressures

• Varies by professional group and across health care sectors.

• Limit innovations where evidence lacking, assess finance and budgetary issues, and enable stakeholder involvement.

• Influenced how evidence was used in decision-making.

Professional interests

Organisational facilitators

Pan-regional organisations

• Influence professional groups’ preferences for innovations and responses to evidence.

• Being ‘data-driven’, well informed to take risks, strong leadership and structures for stakeholder involvement.

• Downward influence on evidence use in local decision-making.

• Upward relationship whereby pan-regional organisations legitimised innovations/encourage disinvestment at organisational level

Power dynamics

Organisational barriers

Widening stakeholder involvement:

• Choice of evidence, its interpretation and use in adoption decisions negotiated.

• Time, resources and pressures; authority to implement change; centralised approach to decision-making.

• External networks enable wider range of potential stakeholders to inform decision-making.

Organisational politics

• Shapes selection and interpretation of evidence.