The Center's evaluation plan includes process and outcome measures for each research project, as well as for the Center in and of itself. One of the primary foci of our evaluation is to assess the relationships the Center establishes and maintains with other organizations, both academic and community. Our primary datasets and an overview of the value of each is outlined below.
Attendance/Participation: This ongoing measurement provides information on how well the projects are able to recruit new members and retain existing members and individual or organizational commitment to the projects.
Leader Survey: The Leader Survey collects information on community leaders’ knowledge of and individual and organizational commitments to addressing health issues in their communities. It allows the project to examine success in increasing community activities and resources for prevention of health-related problems, particularly for low-income residents. Additionally, it assesses key political and health delivery system and community leaders' perceptions about health system priorities and integration plans.
Partner Interview: This annual interview collects information on members’ perceptions of the benefits and costs of participation, organizational climate, leadership, staff, conflict management, satisfaction and participation, and organizational commitment. This data allows us to examine the changing patterns of the relationships among partner organizations and their perceptions of the success of the partnership as the project progresses. It also helps assess significant policy changes in which the project has been involved.
Interorganizational Network Survey: This biannual survey collects information on the extent of collaboration and resource sharing occurs among project partners. It examines the manner in which key organizations in the project partnerships are linked to the delivery of health-related services, how they work together, and how these linkages change over time.
Client Survey: The purpose of this dataset is to assess utilization patterns and changes of the services offered in the health resource centers, what kind of experience clients are having, and their level of satisfaction with those services.
Household Survey: This dataset is specific to the Integrated Health Outreach System project in Hidalgo County, Texas. The survey, administered biannually, provides specific data from colonia households on their health status, healthcare seeking behavior, and factors that influence both.
Longitudinal Survey: The purpose of this data set is to track qualitatively and quantitatively how families have been impacted by changes in the health care system (related to project activities or not) and how those changes have altered their health attitudes and behaviors, and whether their self-sufficiency is changing over time.
File Review: The purpose of this data set is to assess changes in family self-sufficiency over time, as recorded by service coordinators who work with families in the Brazos Valley. The charts being reviewed have initial assessment data, as well as follow up notes on goals the family has reached and changes made in relation to education, employment, housing, nutrition, health, child care, transportation, and family stability. This data will provide an overall assessment of the impact of providing coordinated case management on families in the rural counties of the region, which is central to the Brazos Valley Health Partnership’s strategy for expanding access to care in the rural counties.
Facilities Data: Specific to the Integrated Health Outreach System project, utilization data from each of the service providers local to the target communities allows us to track changes in service capacity as well as changes in utilization patterns.
Meeting Observations: This ongoing measure observes interactions and changes in group dynamics among the Brazos Valley Health Partnership and its subcommittees. The observer will be examining factors such as leadership emergence, decision-making patterns and practices, conflict resolution, participation and drop-out, and evidence of increase collaboration outside the partnership. When analyzed, this qualitative data will be used to support the quantitative data collected in other data sets related to the partners, specifically the network analysis and leadership survey.
Promotora Survey/Interviews: As the focal group of the Integrated Health Outreach System project, promotoras’ roles have substantially changed over time. Local and state policy changes as well as a challenging environment influence high turnover and changing expectations of both agencies who employ promotoras and the promotoras themselves. The survey and interviews explore adequacy of training and support provided, stress and burnout, and perceptions of the value of their role in the healthcare delivery system.
Meeting Effectiveness Inventories/Project Insight Forms: This ongoing measure looks at the effectiveness of the project partnership and its subcommittees and their function as a partnership. It allows for reflections of lessons learned in one community when translation and dissemination into a new community occurs as well as documents the transition from one health problem to another (prevention and disease management of diabetes to a second, locally determined priority).
Formative Evaluation: This evaluation examines the relationships among the leadership and staff associated with existing projects, the proposed core research project, anticipated core projects, and projects funded from other sources. Formative evaluation focuses, too, on the degree of understanding among project leaders and staff about their projects’ contribution to increasing the capacity of the PRC in the four functional areas.
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