Methods	Cluster RCT, with the hospital as the unit of randomisation.
Participants	Nurses from 20 community & teaching hospitals. Intervention: n=10 and Control: n= 10 Country: Canada Type of targeted behaviour: general management of a problem (labour & delivery care)
Interventions	Intervention Local Opinion Leaders Method of OL identification: Sociometric Proportion of social network that nominated OL: NOT CLEAR Single OL or OL teams: teams (in hospitals where teams of nurses rotated shifts together, one nurse was allowed per team. Two hospitals had 4 EIs, two hospitals had 3, and six hospitals had 2.) OL disseminated information: NOT CLEAR OL frequency of involvement: The majority of EIs (62%) at nine hospitals reported that they worked on trial activities on every shift (10 EIs ) or weekly (6 EIs ). Nurses at the remaining hospital reported only monthly participation in trial activities Control Standard dissemination
Outcomes	Health professional outcomes: amount of time nurses spent providing support to labouring women. Patient outcomes: rates of epidural anaesthesia.
Notes
Risk of bias
Bias	Authors’ judgement	Support for judgement
Random sequence generation (selection bias)	Low risk	p 16/Col 1/Para 2 “Using computer generated random allocation performed by a statistician with no knowledge of the hospitals 10 hospitals were allocated to the control group and 10 to the experimental group.”
Allocation concealment (selection bias)	Low risk	p 16/Col 1/Para 2 “Using computer generated random allocation performed by a statistician with no knowledge of the hospitals 10 hospitals were allocated to the control group and 10 to the experimental group.”
Blinding (performance bias and detection bias) All outcomes	Low risk	The data was objective.
Incomplete outcome data (attrition bias) All outcomes	Unclear risk	Not mentioned in the paper.
Selective reporting (reporting bias)	Low risk	All outcomes mentioned in the methods section were also presented in the results
Other bias	Low risk
Similar baseline outcome measures?	High risk	No baseline measurements.
Similar baseline characteristics?	High risk	There were significant between hospital differences.
Protection against contamination?	Low risk	The hospital was the unit of allocation.