Many community-based organizations and clinicians have developed innovative interventions designed to improve health outcomes in high-risk or underserved populations. Project outcomes are often reported as anecdotal success stories or not reported at all.
Examples will be given of common interventions that have been shown to have little or no impact on the intended health outcome, creative projects that appear to be beneficial but have only anecdotal results, and projects that produced unanticipated benefits, but not the health outcome that was originally intended. In an interactive discussion, participants will review methods for defining an intervention and its desired outcome with such focus that they will know when they have made a difference.
The main objective of this session is to help participants move from doing local demonstration projects with “feel-good” results, to projects designed from their inception to be reproducible in their methods and convincing in their results.
Learning Objectives: Participants will learn the following: 1. To identify the missed opportunity that goes along with demonstration projects whose interventions are not precisely defined and whose outcomes are not rigorously measured. 2. Through examples and discussion participants will learn techniques for developing projects designed from their inception to be reproducible in their methods and convincing in their results.
Keywords: Community Health Programs, Community Research
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: Making a Difference? Prove It! monograph was produced by the National Center for Primary Care at Morehouse School of Medicine, and published by the National Association of Community Health Centers.
Disclosure not received
Relationship: Not Received.