Building capacity to evaluate a unique program for maltreated children in Mississippi: A community-academic partnership

Background: The Child Abuse Referral and Examination (CARE) clinic at Children's Justice Center (CJC) in Jackson, MS is the only community-based organization providing non-traumatic, child-friendly forensic medical assessment and health care to victims of child abuse and neglect in the state of Mississippi. With funding from the Johnson & Johnson Community HealthCare Program, CJC has opened 2 satellite CARE clinics in remote areas of the state with the aim of increasing access to CJC's services. With this expansion comes the need to evaluate access to and quality of the services provided.

Methods: Through a participatory approach, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH) has trained CJC staff to design and conduct a program evaluation using a conceptual framework of activities and intended outcomes. Based on this framework, the partners created measures of program implementation and effectiveness, in addition to a data management system using Epi Info for data collection and analysis.

Results: After two years of collaboration, the CJC's capacity to conduct program evaluation and use the results to make programmatic improvements has increased. This was achieved through the utilization of specific evaluation skills, including creation of conceptual frameworks of program activities, development of appropriate indicators to measure effectiveness, and data collection, management and analysis.

Conclusion: Partnerships between community organizations and academic institutions provide a valuable opportunity to increase the sustainable in-house capacity for program evaluation and to provide increased understanding of key determinates essential for improving the access to and quality of medical services for maltreated children.