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

Abstract #117854

Suet Lim, PhD¹, Kathleen H. Coughey, PhD², Nicole Dreisbach, BA², and Brenda Shelton-Dunston, MPH¹. (1) STEPS to a Healthier Philadelphia, Philadelphia Dept of Public Health, 1101 Market St, 9th Fl, Philadelphia, PA 19107, 215 685-5620, suet.lim@phila.gov, (2) Research and Evaluation, Philadelphia Health Management Corporation, 260 S. Broad Street, 20th Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19102

Efforts to incorporate community's voice in public health planning must consider how input will be provided. This was a lesson learned by STEPS to a Healthier Philadelphia, a community-focused initiative, in Year 1 of operations.

Funded by CDC in October 2003, Philadelphia STEPS finalized its Community Consortium in March 2004. Since the establishment of STEPS resulted in a new city health department division that utilizes community health planning, a process evaluation was included in the evaluation plan. The purpose of the process evaluation was to assess fidelity of Year 1 planning activities, identify emerging issues, and provide feedback to STEPS staff for future planning.

As the evaluation contractor, Philadelphia Health Management Corporation (PHMC) conducted a process evaluation of Year 1 STEPS operations. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected through the following: 1) self-assessment survey, 2) key informant interviews and 3) observational notes derived from meetings.

Discussions about the first year's process, sustained through multiple meetings with both community and public health practitioner members, led to the development of core principles for the Consortium. Through their efforts, these principles addressed issues raised by community members regarding their representation, and ultimately their input in the planning process. Structural changes were then proposed for the Consortium. To ensure use of evaluation data in developing policy, STEPS undertook a crosswalk of the recommendations from the process evaluation to the proposed changes. The process evaluation data became the backbone of the renewed partnership between public health practitioners and the community in public health planning.

Learning Objectives: At the end of the session, the participant will be able to

• understand the need for process evaluation when establishing new planning structure
• identify methods used in process evaluation
• apply evaluation data in policy development

Keywords: Community Health Planning,

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.