Evaluating Achievements in Community-Based Environmental Public Health Programs

The Partnerships for Environmental Public Health (PEPH) is one of the signature programs of the National Institute of Environmental Health Science's (NIEHS) Division of Extramural Research and Training (DERT). The lack of standardized evaluation tools and metrics is one of the biggest challenges reported by grantees in implementing community-based environmental public health activities. In response to this challenge, DERT staff worked with grantees to identify and document metrics to evaluate environmental public health initiatives. While these metrics represent innovative opportunities to measure achievements in NIEHS-funded programs, they can be translated easily to other community-based, public health programs. The Manual includes logic models and metrics for five different areas: partnerships; products and dissemination; education, training and curricula; capacity building; and leveraging. The logic models and metrics were developed based on theories of change as well as a review of shared characteristics of successful programs. During this session we will provide an overview of the manual and why it was developed. We will use examples from the PEPH program to illustrate how these metrics can be used to measure and document the results of public health activities. Finally, we will describe how community programs can use the findings from evaluations to inform community planning and policy development. The PEPH Evaluation Metrics Manual is publicly available through the NIEHS PEPH website (http://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/supported/programs/peph/materials/index.cfm) and participants are encouraged to download and review the document prior to the session.