Evaluating policy and advocacy efforts to address asthma inequities

Over the past few decades, the public health field has increasingly focused on addressing health and health care disparities and inequities as a fundamental means of improving population health. This, in turn, has led to evaluation and research endeavors which encompass measures, data collection methods, and analyses that go beyond “traditional” methods to incorporate social determinants of health and well-being, as well as examine outcomes that are not purely medically defined. To the extent that work to address disparities and inequities involve policy change and advocacy efforts, evaluation and research have also evolved to incorporate different definitions of impact so that intermediate and even incremental outcomes can be captured. An evaluation of Regional Asthma Management & Prevention's (RAMP) efforts to become a CDC-funded Center of Excellence in the Elimination of Disparities (CEED) captures the design and execution of many such strategies to assess the effectiveness of RAMP's multi-dimensional approach to reducing social and environmental inequities associated with poor asthma outcomes. The evaluation, which employs quantitative methods built into RAMP's internal reporting procedures and surveys and qualitative observations at RAMP convenings and through interviews targeted towards key stakeholders, will be presented in this session, as well as an overview of RAMP's programmatic efforts. At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to describe RAMP's work as a CEED, list evaluation tools that have proven effective in assessing efforts to reduce disparities and inequities -- particularly policy and advocacy efforts -- and describe best practices in evaluation within this context.