In early 2015, SCPHRP’s previous Working Age/Adult Life Fellow Tony Robertson was approached by the Scottish Community Development Centre / Community Health Exchange (SCDC/CHEX) to assist them in starting the process of evaluating their Health Issues in the Community (HIIC) programme. HIIC is a community educational training programme delivered across Scotland that has been running for the last 18 years, yet is lacking in a comprehensive longitudinal evaluation of its impact on health improvement and reducing health inequalities. These initial discussions generated the idea of conducting an evaluability assessment (a pre-evaluation tool) as an means of identifying a range of options with regards if, and how, HIIC could be evaluated. Given the lack of funding available to carry out such work, SCPHRP developed this as a Masters dissertation project as part of the University of Edinburgh’s Master of Public Health. In May 2015, Melissa Belford started work on the evaluability assessment and this was submitted in August 2015 (and received a passing grade in October 2015). In order to allow SCDC/CHEX, as well as other stakeholders, to utilise the findings from the project, SCPHRP has employed Melissa for around 3.5 months work converting the dissertation into an easily accessible report. The report was completed in November 2015 and is now available to download and share.
For more information regarding this work, please contact Sam Bain (samantha.bain@ed.ac.uk).
