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Toward a Structured Process to Evaluate Health Inequities: Lessons Learned from Developing and Implementing Evaluation Guidelines to Address Health Inequities
Author(s) -
Sridharan Sanjeev,
Zhao Kun,
Nakaima April,
Maplazi Joanna,
Yu Mo,
Qiu Yingpeng
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
new directions for evaluation
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.374
H-Index - 40
eISSN - 1534-875X
pISSN - 1097-6736
DOI - 10.1002/ev.20248
Subject(s) - program evaluation , capacity building , equity (law) , health equity , public relations , psychological intervention , salience (neuroscience) , monitoring and evaluation , social determinants of health , health policy , political science , economic growth , sociology , psychology , public health , medicine , nursing , public administration , economics , law , cognitive psychology
This paper discusses the development and implementation of structured guidelines that contained a fixed set of questions as part of a project in building evaluation capacity for addressing health inequities in the health sector in China. The ambition of the guidelines was to test whether a structured process of questions could aid teams that did not have a strong background in evaluation to complete equity‐focused evaluations and also help raise the salience of health equity as an important goal of health systems reform among the participants of the project. The guidelines were informed by multiple perspectives that included the literature on social determinants of health, realist evaluation, and utilization/influence perspectives. One noteworthy aspect of this project was that the participants in this capacity‐building project were local and national policymakers, practitioners, and university researchers. Our original goal was to test these guidelines in equity‐focused policy interventions in three separate provinces of China. One key insight from this project was that there is a need to move away from a testing perspective to a developmental approach in formulating evaluation guidelines that can work across multiple organizational and country contexts and also closely reflect the needs of practitioners and policymakers in evaluation capacity‐building efforts.