Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #113382

M. Celeste Marin, MPH, NetMark, Academy for Educational Development, 1825 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20009, 202-884-8523, cmarin@aed.org, Anastasia J. Gage, PhD, Department of International Health and Development, Tulane University, 1440 Canal Street, Suite 2200, New Orleans, LA 70112, and Suhaila H. Khan, Tulane School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine, Department of International Health & Development, 1440 Canal Street, Suite 2200, New Orleans, LA 70112.

Operations Research (OR) is a problem-solving tool for program managers to generate and use evidence to make decisions about how to deliver services most effectively and efficiently. The resources invested in the research are justified by the impact the findings will have on improving service delivery at a broader level, as successful interventions are expanded or adopted by others and ineffective interventions are discontinued. USAID and other donors have supported OR in reproductive health for decades, but with little systematic evaluation of whether or how results are utilized to improve programs or policy. As a partner on the Frontiers in Reproductive Health Program, Tulane University developed a qualitative and quantitative approach to assess utilization of OR results and applied it to 58 intervention and evaluative studies conducted by FRONTIERS in 20 countries between 1998 and 2003. We describe the degree to which these studies led to changes in program implementation, institutional and national policy, donor funding and organizational capacity for evidence-based decision-making, and identify key factors that influenced utilization. We further discuss the advantages this methodology has over the case study approach that predominates in the literature on utilization. Finally, we identify shortcomings of our approach and barriers that must be overcome to objectively and comprehensively evaluate utilization of OR. We found utilization associated with program characteristics such as leadership and commitment to using evidence, and with characteristics of the research process, such as a salient topic, compelling results, few barriers to implementation and a collaborative researcher/program relationship.

Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of the session, the participant (learner) in this session will be able to

• Articulate the importance of measuring utilization of applied research results.
• Describe utilization in terms of program and policy change.
• Apply these definitions of utilization to assess whether a research study was successful.

Keywords: Reproductive Health Research, Utilization

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.

Recorded presentation