The Evaluation Handbook for Health Professionals

Book excerpt: This easy-to-use handbook is a useful resource for all health professionals engaged in processes of evaluation in a variety of contexts within the world of healthcare. Encouraging an evidence-based approach to practice, it provides: * guidelines on how to design and evaluate an intervention * examples of good practice * reliable and easy-to-use measures * advice on how to work effectively. Designed to prompt self-evaluation and group project evaluation, it illustrates how simple evaluation methods can help to break down the divisions between research and practice. It shows how more practitioners can apply such methods to improve the quality of care as well as the treatments and services which they offer their patients and clients. The examples, drawn from clinical settings, community practice and work in the voluntary sector, demonstrate the kind of evaluation that can be undertaken by a small-scale team or a single practitioner with limited resources. The Evaluation Handbook will be a useful source of reference for those new to evaluation as well as more experienced managers and researchers.