The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA

Abstract #47203

Patricia Charles, DrPH and Caroline Ford, MPH. School of Medicine, University of Nevada, Mail Stop 150, Reno, NV 89557, 775-784-1373, patty@unr.nevada.edu

The implementation of public health programs in rural communities must incorporate evaluation and outcome measures in order to justify ongoing efforts and commitment of scarce resources. With the emergence of Healthy People 2010 and the Government Performance and Results Act, requests for evaluation assistance from rural program directors have escalated. Evaluation models must be feasible, practical, and yield information that will gauge the cost and benefit of expending resources for programs. Rural and frontier communities often do not have exposure to and knowledge of applied evaluation methods. An understanding of this area is essential when applying for funds and creating new programs. Focus on outcome measures and performance indicators are common knowledge for experienced grant writers and government project administrators. Community agencies and small practice sites often do not have this exposure, therefore they may misinterpret meaningful project outcomes. The Outreach Center has extensive experience in working with rural communities and will describe the practical approaches that we take to program evaluation. We will discuss how to develop an evaluation consultation service, provide guidelines for developing evaluation models, and review procedures for data collection and analysis. Collaboration with rural stakeholders is key to successful evaluation. Gauging public health impacts and program strengths are crucial to building upon program infrastructures in rural communities. Assessment of the critical elements of a program and utilizing key outcomes become essential to the continuity of funding and to reauthorization of programs. Sound evaluation of community based programs yield great benefits. Although in many cases the number of people involved in programs may be small, results may have dramatic implications when sound data is aggregated from many projects. We will provide examples of how collaboration is accomplished. The final products of program evaluation are reports and documents that can generate recommendations for future program development. We will use examples from our experience and will provide attendees with a handout describing the steps to practical evaluation for rural public health.

Learning Objectives: Program attendees will be able to

• Describe the importance of using practical approaches to evaluation.
• Incorporate guidelines into developing evaluation consultation services for rural communities.
• Describe an approach to generating recommendations from results of program evaluation.

Keywords: Evaluation, Rural Health

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.