Developmental Evaluation, Navigating Complexity: 'Evidence for Change' - Case Study

Developmental evaluation (DE) was introduced by Quinn Patton and is designed to be used as an ongoing and emergent evaluation process in situations where there is complexity, innovation, and change - often rapid change. Evidence for Change (EfC) is a professional development initiative in the North West Coast of England, funded by a research grant from the National Institute for Health Research as part of the Collaboration for Leadership in Health Research and Care. The initiative was designed to support teams of health and social care practitioners, the public and academics to work together to identify and analyse evidence in order to inform a change in a specific aspect of their professional practice or service delivery. The EfC pilot initiative ran over an eight month period in 2015 and included five workshops and a team dissemination event. The initiative was innovative in that it supported teams of practitioners to work together to navigate a complex, rapidly emerging and diverse environment in order to develop their service provision. We used DE from the outset to develop the initiative, to capture the short and long term impact on the participants, their organisations and their services. We chose DE because of the complexities within the NHS and Public Health environments in which we were working. Our case study will present the basic assumptions that underpinned EfC, the process of evaluation used as the initiative evolved as well as the developmental evaluation lens used to make decisions during the pilot of EfC. It will also present the preliminary results of the evaluation to date including the results of workshop evaluations, participant questionnaires, team focus groups and structured interviews