Developing an Evaluation Plan (Nursing)

00:01 This presentation is all about program planning and evaluation.

00:05 We're going to talk about how to develop and carry out an evaluation plan.

00:10 So once the focus of your program has been established, the very first step in the planning process is to develop an evaluation plan.

00:18 Now to sum, this may seem a little backwards, how can you write an evaluation plan if you don't even know what you're going to do? Well think about it like this.

00:26 Your evaluation plan is really your blueprint for your program.

00:30 Now, you would never just start building a house and hope that it turns out the way that you want.

00:35 First, you create your blueprint, you determine how many bedrooms you want, how many bathrooms you want, where you want the kitchen to be, where you want the front door.

00:42 By having that plan, that final result nailed down, you're able to then work towards that.

00:49 So I can't stress this enough.

00:51 In order to get where we're going, we need to know our final destination.

00:54 So always begin your intervention planning by starting with your Evaluation Plan.

01:01 When creating our evaluation plan, there are two different types of objectives that we develop.

01:05 We develop process objectives, and outcome objectives.

01:09 Our outcome objectives are our final desired results.

01:13 Our process objectives are everything that we need to do in order to get to that final outcome.

01:19 So let's take a look at an example.

01:22 Let's say our overall goal is to increase influenza vaccination rates for children at a local preschool.

01:29 Our process objectives would include things such as: the number of parent information sessions that we hold, we could also look at the number of parents who attend these information sessions.

01:39 Our outcome objective, of course, is that increase in vaccination rates.

01:43 Let's say we want to go from 90% to 95%.

01:47 Now, again, our process objectives are all of the things of the tasks that we need to do in order to make impact to meet that final outcome.

01:56 So let's say at the end, we increased vaccination rates, but we only went from 90% to 92%.

02:03 What we could do is we could look back on all of our process objectives, to see what we could do differently next time.

02:09 If our goal was to hold say, for information sessions, we can look back and say we held those four information sessions.

02:16 But maybe our goal was to reach 20 parents, but we realized that we only reached eight.

02:20 So next time, what we would do, instead of say holding more information sessions, we could focus our intention on increasing the number of parents who attend each of those information sessions.

02:33 There are two other types of evaluation that we use in public health nursing.

02:37 Formative and summative.

02:39 Now, these are terms that you might already be familiar with.

02:41 So if you are, what I challenge you to do is pause the video and see if you can distinguish the difference between formative and summative evaluation.

02:55 Formative evaluation takes place during our intervention, while summative evaluation takes place after the intervention is complete.

03:03 So imagine you had a six week long health promotion activity.

03:07 Formative evaluation would take place say after the week after the first week of the intervention.

03:12 This would allow us to explore what went well, and what improvements we can make moving forward.

03:17 Our summative evaluation happens at the end of the intervention after week six.

03:22 Formative evaluation really focuses on the process, while summative evaluation focuses on the product or the final outcome.

03:31 Now when we're writing our objectives, it's important to make sure that they are smart.

03:36 And S.M.A.R.T. This is an acronym.

03:38 So let's go through each of the letters to determine what they mean.

03:42 Let's start first with S.

03:43 This stands for Specific.

03:45 We want to make sure that our objectives are specific and that we are measuring exactly what it is that we set out to do.

03:52 Next, we want to make sure that they're measurable.

03:55 How will we know when we've accomplished what we've set out to do? A stands for Attainable.

04:01 Is this realistic? Have we set a goal that we can actually accomplish in the timeframe we set out? R stands for Relevant.

04:09 Is this a worthwhile goal? Are we working with the right group to accomplish this goal? And finally, we have T for Time-Sensitive? What is the timeline in which we're going to complete our objective? So let's take a look at an example.

04:25 The example we have here is of a SMART goal but I think we can make it a little smarter.

04:30 75% of participants will complete the educational sessions and express interest in more education.

04:37 What would you do to make this smarter? Could you make it more specific? Could you make it more measurable? Well, the first thing that I see here is the word 'and'.

04:47 Anytime you have the word 'and' in an objective, I encourage you to really sit back, evaluate that, and most likely, what you're going to need to do is break that into two separate objectives.

04:57 So imagine a scenario where 75% of the participants complete the education session, but only 50% express interest In more education.

05:05 Did you meet this goal? Some would say you did meet it, some would say you wouldn't.

05:10 And it's not that you didn't do a good job at your intervention, it's just that your goal was written in a way that made it hard to measure.

05:16 So here's what I would suggest doing here, breaking this up into two.

05:21 The first smart goal would read like this.

05:23 75% of participants will complete one education session by May 31, as documented on session sign in sheet.

05:31 It's specific, it's telling us how we're going to measure this, and it's time sensitive.

05:37 So let's take a look at the second part of the objective.

05:40 75% of participants who complete one education session will select, Yes, I would like further education on this topic on the post education survey.

05:49 So again, it's more specific, it tells us exactly how we are going to measure whether or not we accomplished our goal.

05:56 So here we have it all pulled together.

05:58 Our original SMART objective, and then the two SMART objectives that we created to make this even smarter.

06:05 Now remember, the first step in doing your program planning is creating a solid evaluation plan by creating SMART objectives, both process and outcome and taking into consideration, formative and summative evaluation.