Evaluation

Making sure we understand what works to improve the quality of healthcare is a central part of everything we do at the Health Foundation.

Our evaluation approach

We evaluate our programmes to provide sound evidence of the effects they have demonstrated, and to better understand how these effects work. We use evaluation findings to inform health care providers, commissioners and policy makers about learning from the programmes.

• View all our current evaluations

What does evaluation mean at the Health Foundation?

We evaluate our programmes for three main reasons – to assess, describe and explain:

• We assess the outcomes of each programme; the benefits for the participants, their organisations, patients and the healthcare system as a whole.
• We describe the way the programme is delivered and has been experienced so that other organisations wanting to set up a similar programme can find out how we did it.
• We explain how the outcomes were achieved, look at which things made the programme successful and what could have happened without the intervention?

Why do we do evaluations?

Our evaluations help us to:

• See how successful each programme is.
• Understand how well the programme is being delivered and what key stakeholders think about it, so that we can make improvements.
• Ensure that we’re accountable for the money that we spend on our programmes.

How do we do it?

We commission academic research teams or consultants to assess the effectiveness of our ideas for improving the quality of healthcare. Using external teams means they can have greater objectivity, and also means we can access a wider range of expertise.

Our evaluators design their work to:

• provide ongoing feedback to The Health Foundation, our technical support providers and demonstration sites
• provide an overall assessment of the programme’s effectiveness.

Our evaluators also help develop a culture of measurement within our programmes. Working with technical providers, they support demonstration sites to collect data, and analyse it, and to carry out self-evaluation of their work.

We communicate the findings of our studies to healthcare decision-makers and provide a forum for analysis and debate around quality and health system performance issues.