An important challenge for the field of injury prevention and control is the translation of research findings into effective community-based prevention programs and practices. The National Center for Injury Prevention and Control believes that dissemination research can overcome this challenge by providing insight into the structures and methods needed to translate injury control research into everyday practice. The proposed dissemination research study will rigorously assess whether the use of a "facilitative system" can successfully bridge the gap between injury prevention and control research and the implementation of evidence-driven, community-based programs, policies, and practices. The facilitative system links communities with academic partners to provide communities with the skills and resources needed to help facilitate the community health improvement process. The system identifies what assets are available within communities, as well as the skills and resources needed to work through the community health improvement process. The facilitative system will then provide technical assistance, best practices guides, and direct consultation in carrying out all phases of the community health improvement process. This information is designed to increase community capacity in community assessment, coalition development, accessing and interpreting local injury prevention data, searching and selecting evidence-based research, and program planning and evaluation. The study will use a randomized community trial design to evaluate fall injury occurrence and process measures of program implementation in three groups of communities:

• a control group receiving no special resources or guidance related to fall injury prevention or the community health improvement process;
• a "Standard Program" group receiving modest funding to implement an "evidence-based" fall prevention program in their local community;
• a "Facilitative System" group receiving facilitative system support in addition to the resources provided the Standard Program group.

We hypothesize that the Facilitative System program will be more effective at:

• reducing fall-related injuries in the elderly;
• building community coalitions that are goal-oriented and sustainable;
• implementing community-based, evidence-driven fall prevention programs that are both tailored to the community needs and yet faithful to empirically-tested fall prevention research studies