Making Change Visible: Evaluating Efforts to Advance Social Participation in Health

If you are responsible for—or engaged or interested in—advancing social/community participation in health in your local area, we developed this resource for you. There are a variety of resources available on how to organise SPH, but there is limited guidance on how to evaluate its effectiveness. This publication fills that gap for those in a position to make decisions or take actions to advance SPH. This resource is thus not about how to implement SPH in your community, but rather how to evaluate your efforts on SPH, to help you answer the question: what differences are our SPH efforts making? The Resource aims to help you and your colleagues to conduct a baseline assessment, creating a critical reference point at the start of your SPH program that will help you plan your work and enable you to track changes as they are achieved. It will guide you in carrying out a performance evaluation, which will tell you how well the SPH intervention is performing as you are implementing it  for you to review and make any 'course corrections' needed. Finally, it explains how to conduct an outcome or impact evaluation, assessing the changes achieved, directly and indirectly, as a result of the SPH intervention. The Resource was developed by an international team co-ordinated by Training and Research Support Centre and with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Global Fund at CAF America. We piloted use of the Resource in 2022 and have made some corrections to this version of the guide. Please see the Facilitator Guide for Resource on this page and let us know your feedback on the online form. For any other queries please email admin@tarsc.org. 

Users of the Making Change Visible Implementer’s Resource have asked us to make available the worksheets in a form that can be filled electronically, downloaded and printed. We have thus made each worksheet available online for this and provide the links to them in this document. Please download and fill as a team, or fill online (pasting into a google document). You can expand the rows or cells, add as much text as you need, modify, save and reopen and edit, and download and print as you need. Use the worksheets with the Resource to discuss the methods and evidence you will use, and save them as a record to use when you prepare your reports.

This short guide complements the Making Change Visible (MCV) Implementers’ Resource. Its purpose is to make it easier for you to use the Resource with your colleagues or others interested in learning about evaluation—specifically, evaluation of interventions that promote or expand social participation in health (SPH). This guide walks you through three different approaches to evaluation training workshops/skills sessions that vary based on the level of instruction needed. They are:  1. A three-hour overview session to introduce and outline what the Resource provides; 2. A three-day workshop on how to use the Resource with people who are likely to design or support an evaluation of SPH; and 3. A real-time coaching effort in which training sessions using the Resource are integrated into the actual team process of designing and implementing an evaluation for an SPH intervention.  Of course, you should use the Resource in whatever ways and in whichever settings work best for you and your colleagues. This guide provides suggestions, not prescriptions, on the following: Using the Resource, worksheets, and sample schedules for the three different evaluation training approaches; Preparing for and facilitating evaluation training workshops/skills sessions; and Gathering feedback on sessions from participants, and an evaluation form for facilitators to provide feedback on their use of the Resource. The first edition of the guide was revised in 2022 after piloting its use and hearing your feedback on it and the updated version is provided here. Please let us know any improvements to make in the online feedback form on the site 

Este Recurso le ayudará a usted y a sus colegas a realizar una evaluación de base, creando un punto de referencia crítico al comienzo de su programa de la participación social en la salud (PSS) que le ayudará a planificar su trabajo y le permitirá seguir los cambios a medida que se producen logros. Le guiará en la realización de una evaluación de desempeño, que le indicará el desempeño de la intervención de la PSS a medida que la vaya ejecutando y si está produciendo las acciones y los resultados previstos en los plazos deseados. Por último, explica cómo llevar a cabo una evaluación de resultados o de impacto, en la que se valoran los cambios logrados, directa e indirectamente, como resultado de la intervención de la PSS.

If you used the Making Change Visible Implementers’ Resource in a training or evaluation setting please fill and submit this online form to give us feedback. It will not take long and your comments will help improve the Resource. Thank you in advance for your feedback. We will periodically compile feedback and made it available in an anonymised report on this page of the Shaping health website. Please contact us if you have queries or need further information not found on this page or on the form. 

This slide show is a resource for those giving an overview of the resource on evaluating community-based health interventions, titled “Making Change Visible: Evaluating Efforts to Advance Social Participation in Health: An Implementer’s Resource.” The slide show was prepared by the team co-ordinated by Training and Research Support Center and Teri Larson within the Shaping Health consortium. It provides 10 slides that can be used to introduce and explain the content of the Resource and how it assists to evaluate efforts to promote social participation in health. Please contact TARSC to obtain the powerpoint version of the slides. There is also a more detailed set of slides and resource materials for facilitators running longer sessions on the Resource. Please contact TARSC for further information on this.