About evaluation
What is evaluation?
Improving the quality of health care and services is a priority for NHS commissioners, managers, practitioners and service users. A great way of delivering and ensuring service improvement is through the evaluation of current and new services.
NHS Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire all expect that existing and new services will be evaluated, and the findings shared within the local health community. There is also high level Government support for these activities with practitioners being positively encouraged to evaluate and improve their services.
It is only through measuring what we do .... that teams can improve the quality of care for patients – by capturing data and harnessing technology, making information available to the whole team and taking collective responsibility for the results.
Department of Health, 2009, p27
What are the drivers for evaluation?
There are a wide range of drivers for evaluation including a number of policies, guidelines and frameworks that include evaluation within their agenda, these include:
- The NHS White Paper “Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS”
- Commissioning Cycle
- Royal College of General Practitioners Commissioning Framework
- National Social Marketing Centre - Procurement Guidelines for Social Marketing.
The key question is "what drives you?".
What are the benefits of evaluation?
Evaluations enable you to demonstrate:
- value for money
- evidence for the service or initiative
- informed decisions and legitimacy for making changes
- accountability
- effectiveness and efficiency of the service or initiative
- benefits of the service or initiative.
How can the APCRC help with evaluation?
We can provide you with:
- support, advice and sign-posting for your new or existing evaluations
- access to an evaluation toolkit to support the planning and development of your project
- monitor and quality assure the methodology you use
- link you with others undertaking similar projects
- help you to publish and disseminate your findings
- give you access to a database of completed evaluations
- provide workshops and training to develop the evaluation abilities of your team.
For any advice and support please contact us at research@apcrc.nhs.uk
To register a project with us please download the registration form which will take 5 minutes to complete and will provide us with the basic information to enable us to respond to your requirements promptly.
About this section
This section of our webpage explains the APCRC role in evaluation and how we can help you. This section covers:
- Advice – directs you to the key people to contact in the APCRC regarding evaluation
- Methodology – provides a guide to evaluation methodologies
- Training - provides information about our training offerings and other local training opportunities
- Toolkit – provides access to our evaluation resources and tools
- Reports – provides access to BNSSG wide evaluations and audits
- Patient and Public Involvement in Evaluation
- Links – provides some useful links to support you in your evaluation.