
Evaluating health services initiatives: How can we work effectively together?
Posted on behalf of Rhiannon Hawkes and Sarah Cotterill
Evaluations of health services initiatives are often undertaken with the intention of generating insights about whether to continue or adapt a policy or service. Another purpose of these evaluations is to understand how and why these initiatives work (or don’t work), to offer broader insights which will influence how other services are developed in the future.
However, these types of evaluations are often complex and involve different stakeholders who have the same long-term goals, but have different barriers, systems and structures in place. Understanding these different expectations and ways of working is key to delivering a successful evaluation.
At the Health Services Research UK 2024 conference in Oxford, Dr Rhiannon Hawkes (University of Manchester), Dr Sarah Cotterill (University of Manchester), Prof Annette Boaz (Kings College London), and Prof Helen Atherton (University of Southampton) developed and delivered a workshop, titled: ‘How to manage tensions when evaluating health services initiatives’.
The workshop focused on managing relationships with different stakeholders when evaluating health services initiatives. Attendees were encouraged to discuss important challenges relevant to academics, policy makers and industry partners, including:
- How to sufficiently prepare for these evaluations, and the timescales required for this before starting the evaluation.
- How to manage data access.
- How to build successful working relationships with different stakeholders and communicate effectively throughout the evaluation.
- Considerations for policy makers before involving external evaluators.
- Stakeholders’ differing expectations of rate/speed of evaluation.
- Considerations when involving industry partners.
A total of 50 people attended the workshop, who worked in academia, health policy, the NHS, charity sector organisations, funding organisations, independent service provider organisations and patients and members of the public. The attendees provided fantastic insights into how we can all work together to successfully evaluate policy programmes.
Some key take home messages from the workshop included:
- All stakeholders bring a unique and important perspective to the evaluation.
- Clear communication and positive working relationships are key to managing expectations of different stakeholders from the outset.
- There is a lot of advance preparation required before the evaluation begins (e.g., data access, information governance, contracts and agreements), which all take time and determine the success of the evaluation.
- Outcomes of the evaluation are better when stakeholders work together to bring their different expertise, knowledge and skills.
The insights from this workshop have since been consolidated into an infographic, designed by illustrator James Munro (MisterMunro Ltd).
The infographic (preview below) can be downloaded from The University of Manchester Figshare (https://doi.org/10.48420/27939297.v1).
We hope this is a useful resource for anyone involved in evaluating health policy programmes.
If you would like more information, contact: rhiannon.hawkes@manchester.ac.uk.
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