Public programs at all levels face increased accountability, and the need to demonstrate results. This becomes an especially important issue for Federal programs that accomplish significant portions of their mission through grants or cooperative agreements with state and local levels. In particular, such programs need a planning and evaluation system that helps channel the disparate efforts of grantees into a common direction, yet permits sufficient flexibility to respond to local conditions. CDC's National Diabetes Control Program is in the midst of implementing a new planning and evaluation strategy. The new evaluation strategy moves the CDC-funded State and jurisdictional Diabetes Control Programs (DCPs) in the direction of: emphasizing evaluation from a public health/population perspective, assuring that efforts are directed toward a set of seven National Objectives, and developing evaluation plans that are linked to workplans and include measurable indicators at the process and impact levels. This session will present the components of the new evaluation strategy, the process used by CDC to enlist DCP cooperation with the strategy, and the degree to which the strategy has been implemented by DCPs and resulted in closer convergence of DCP and National Objectives. The session will also address some core principles of good evaluation systems, some common pitfalls in implementing systems and the ways in which CDC incorporated these principles and avoided the pitfalls in its new evaluation strategy.
Learning Objectives: By the end of the session, participants will: - understand six common pitfalls in evaluation - understand the role of national and state/local levels in a multi-level evaluation program - be familiar with the National Diabetes Control Program as a case study of relating National Objectives and state/local action
Keywords: Evaluation, Diabetes
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: None
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.