“When it comes to preventing crime, all the value for money comes from investing in communities, in social programs, in activities and mentoring for young people… rather than spending on the criminal justice system.” Prevention continues to make headway toward becoming a cornerstone of UK consensus politics.

From burrowing in the small print of US Health Care Reform bill, commentators emerge with a shot in the arm for comparative effectiveness research, a tangle of questions about the future of randomized controlled trials – and ammunition for the cost-benefit analyst.

Washington's Communities that Care "prevention system" takes two more steps toward becoming part of the standard international equipment of reliable evidence-based program implementation.

Assembling registries of effective programs is about as much use as car manufacturers relying on published lists of roadworthy models to keep the industry in business, public health researchers tell a US program implementation conference. Too passive, they claim, and potential buyers don’t use them.

Minnesota researchers concede that no organization is ever totally prepared for the move into evidence-based practice. So assessments of “readiness” should not be seen as a threat but as an invitation to improve support for what lies ahead.

Delegates to the third annual National Institutes of Health conference in Bethesda, Maryland, hear sobering news that after several years of intensive technical support, a significant proportion of community leaders still struggle to give "expert" answers to critical implementation questions.

Coca-Cola products should always be “within an arm’s reach of desire” said the drink manufacturer's CEO, Robert Woodruff, in the 1960s. What might researchers and evaluators in Bethesda, Maryland, this week, have to learn from a multinational company’s market segmentation, sales and customer service?

A multi-faceted, population-based intervention designed to nip conduct disorders in the bud, which unusually combines behavioral treatment with literacy teaching, has made a good showing in eight London schools.

Back to the roots: Dublin schoolchildren join the “race to global consciousness” as a new social and emotional learning program comes to town from Canada.

Researchers in Utrecht try to confound the skeptics by identifying a potentially effective confidence-building “chemistry” at the heart of a home visiting program. Home-Start provides vulnerable mothers with a useful source of moral support – but it has still to prove it can alleviate their children’s problems.

US researchers Dean Fixsen and Karen Blase recruit an old testament prophet, a civil rights activist and the founder of the Chicago Leadership Institute to the good cause of better implementation science.

BBC radio helps to knit together the case in favor of focusing help for vulnerable children on their needs in infancy by giving prime airtime to the theories of the neuroscientific successors of Piaget and Chomsky.

A new variation on the theme of Iowa State University’s Strengthening Families program is getting a chance to prove its versatility in a Pennsylvania community trial funded by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse.

For "fidelity" and "scalability" read off-the-peg internet delivery – but online drug and alcohol prevention programs work, say researchers in New South Wales, Australia.

The failure of the US Head Start program to produce evidence of lasting benefit is no reason for despair, say Washington researchers. It strengthens the case for making the search for what works more specific and more rigorous.

The principles of the Good Behavior Game, a classroom management strategy designed to reduce aggressive student behavior, are being translated to the more recreational environment of afterschool.

The CEO of the Barnardos children’s charity in Ireland commends an abuse prevention and “behavior policy” program to families in the West, where it is beginning its first community trial.