Gauging the effectiveness of community-based public health projects

This chapter explores some of the strategies that can be utilised to assess the effectiveness of community-based public health projects. It examines some of the reasons why it is important to measure the effectiveness of community action for health. It then considers the values underpinning evaluations of community action for health. The third section looks at the forms that such evaluations can take, the methods and methodolgy employed in making them, and the use made of different forms of evidence. Finally it moves away from the more general ideas around evaluating community-based projects to focus on a somewhat different kind of evaluation: that of Health Impact Assessment (HIA)