dc.contributor.author | Denford, S | |
dc.contributor.author | Abraham, C | |
dc.contributor.author | Callaghan, M | |
dc.contributor.author | Aighton, P | |
dc.contributor.author | De Vocht, F | |
dc.contributor.author | Arris, S | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2018-01-24T13:46:43Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2017-09-12 | |
dc.description.abstract | BACKGROUND: Public Health evaluation is essential to understanding what does and does not work, and robust demonstration of effectiveness may be crucial to securing future funding. Despite this, programs are often implemented with poor, incomplete or no evaluation. Public health practitioners are frequently required to provide evidence for the effectiveness of their services; thus, there is a growing need for evaluation guidance on how to evaluate public health programs. The aim of this study is to identify accessible high-quality, evaluation guidance, available to researchers and practitioners and to catalogue, summarise and categorise the content of a subset of accessible, quality guides to evaluation. METHODS: We systematically reviewed grey and academic literature for documents providing support for evaluation of complex health interventions. Searches were conducted January to March 2015, and included academic databases, internet search engines, and consultations with academic and practicing public health experts. Data were extracted by two authors and sent to the authors of the guidance documents for comments. RESULTS: Our initial search identified 402 unique documents that were screened to identify those that were (1) developed by or for a national or international organization (2) freely available to all (3) published during or after 2000 (4) specific to public health. This yielded 98 documents from 43 organisations. Of these, 48 were reviewed in detail. This generated a detailed catalogue of quality evaluation guidance. The content included in documents covers 37 facets of evaluation. CONCLUSIONS: A wide range of guidance on evaluation of public health initiatives is available. Time and knowledge constraints may mean that busy practitioners find it challenging to access the most, up-to-date, relevant and useful guidance. This review presents links to and reviews of 48 quality guides to evaluation as well as categorising their content. This facilitates quick and each access to multiple selected sources of specific guidance. | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | This study was funded by the National Institute for Health Research School for Public Health Research (NIHR SPHR) project with additional support from the NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care of the South West Peninsula (PenCLAHRC). | en_GB |
dc.identifier.citation | Vol. 17, article 643 | en_GB |
dc.identifier.doi | 10.1186/s12913-017-2588-2 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10871/31172 | |
dc.language.iso | en | en_GB |
dc.publisher | BioMed Central | en_GB |
dc.relation.url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28899388 | en_GB |
dc.rights | © The Author(s). Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. | en_GB |
dc.subject | Evaluation guidance | en_GB |
dc.subject | Public health | en_GB |
dc.subject | Review | en_GB |
dc.title | A review of Grey and academic literature of evaluation guidance relevant to public health interventions | en_GB |
dc.type | Article | en_GB |
dc.date.available | 2018-01-24T13:46:43Z | |
exeter.place-of-publication | England | en_GB |
dc.description | This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from BioMed Central via the DOI in this record. | en_GB |
dc.identifier.journal | BMC Health Services Research | en_GB |