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Young people receiving services for substance use problems often experience high rates of other psychosocial problems in addition to mental disorders. This has implications for design of effective interventions. There is a lack of concisely organised practical information to help organisations serving this population establish contextually relevant and rigorous approaches to the design of evidence‐based interventions. This paper aims to focus on these issues.

Drawing on literature from clinical and implementation science, this paper describes a new approach to the development and implementation of evidence‐based practice (EBP). Contributions of innovators, early adopters, evaluators, and other scholars are reviewed and synthesized.

Traditional approaches to EBP relying on manualised programs targeting discrete diagnoses have not yielded meaningful progress in the dissemination of EBP to services that specialise in treatment and support for young people experiencing complex psychosocial needs. Recent initiatives are moving away from reliance on manualised programs and adopting a modular practice elements approach that enables maximum flexibility in responding to the unique needs of individual clients. This approach has potential to mitigate barriers to implementation of EBP in resource poor environments.

The complexity of needs presented by young people with dual mental health and substance use problems is increasingly recognised, but there is little information available that supports the formulation evidence‐based interventions that directly address this complexity. This paper applies knowledge from research to the practical challenges faced by practice leaders in real‐world services.

This study aims to investigate whether and how organizational culture moderates the influence of other organizational capacities on the uptake of new mental health care roles by non‐medical primary health and social care services.

Using a cross‐sectional survey design, data were collected in 2004 from providers in 41 services in Victoria, Australia, recruited using purposeful sampling. Respondents within each service worked as a group to complete a structured interview that collected quantitative and qualitative data simultaneously. Five domains of organizational capacity were analyzed: leadership, moral support and participation; organizational culture; shared concepts, policies, processes and structures; access to resource support; and social model of health. A principal components analysis explored the structure of data about roles and capacities, and multiple regression analysis examined relationships between them. The unit of analysis was the service (n=41).

Organizational culture was directly associated with involvement in two types of mental health care roles and moderated the influence of factors in the inter‐organizational environment on role involvement.

Congruence between the values embodied in organizational culture, communicated in messages from the environment, and underlying particular mental health care activities may play a critical role in shaping the emergence of intersectoral working and the uptake of new roles.

This study is the first to demonstrate the importance of organizational culture to intersectoral collaboration in health care, and one of very few to examine organizational culture as a predictor of performance, compared with other organizational‐level factors, in a multivariate analysis. Theory is developed to explain the findings.