Central to our strategy for improving the quality of healthcare is a rigorous programme of evaluation. This enables us to assess the impact of our work objectively and to evaluate the effectiveness of our ideas for improving healthcare quality. We are also committing resources towards communicating these results to healthcare decision-makers and providing a forum for evidence-based analysis and debate around quality and health system performance issues.
All of our programmes are subject to external evaluation and wherever possible we commit to evaluating our work beyond the life of the funded period. Our evaluations help us to:
- see how successful each programme is. This will help us decide whether to continue or change a programme but most of all we want to generate learning that other people in the healthcare system can use
- know how well the programme is being delivered and what key stakeholders think about it, so that we can make any necessary improvements
- ensure that we’re accountable for the money that we spend on our programmes, to show that its been well spent.
Our evaluation activity tries to do three things - assess, describe and explain.
- We assess the outcomes of each programme; the benefits to the individual award holders or teams, to their organisations, to patients and to the healthcare system as a whole.
- We describe the way the programme is delivered and experienced to generate the information we need to carry out any necessary mid-course corrections, and so that other organisations that want to set up a similar programme can find out how we did it.
- We explain how the outcomes were achieved. The key question we want to share with others is: which things made the programme successful? We also attempt to answer the question: what would have happened if this intervention had not occurred?
Our evaluators design their work to meet the dual needs of providing ongoing feedback to The Health Foundation, its technical support providers and demonstration sites (this is known as formative evaluation), as well as providing an overall assessment of the programme’s effectiveness (known as summative evaluation).
Another key role of our evaluators is to develop of a culture of measurement within our programmes. We do this by helping demonstration sites to undertake self-evaluation, by promoting a data-driven approach to improvement and by providing data analysis support.
Read our evaluation reports
Read about Our approach to research and development