Why Evaluate?
As one of the 10 Essential Public Health Services
, the purpose of public health assessment and evaluation is to demonstrate the success or progress of programs, policies, or initiatives; examine their strengths and weaknesses; identify best practices; and improve their design, implementation, effectiveness, and impact.
Program evaluation allows the owner, manager or champion of a program, policy, or initiative to assess execution, and determine whether it achieved intended outcomes and overall impact. Evaluation is used to:
- Adequately prioritize and allocate resources to ensure accountability to leadership and those we serve.
- Improve current activities and future planning. Help to answer important questions from leadership on execution and effectiveness via systematic, data-driven findings and recommendations.
- Make decisions on evidence as opposed to intuition.
- Implement evidence-based best practices and test them in a real-world environment.
- Proactively identify and fix a wrong before it perpetuates.
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Public health program evaluation is not limited to public health entities alone, but also to any entity whose activity stands to impact the public's health in the short- or long-term. Every entity should therefore evaluate the potential for its activity's impacts on the spiritual, psychological, social, as well as physical health of any population. Further, the environment is always evolving and needs can change over time across and within the DoD. Thus, evaluation should be viewed as an ongoing mission activity and not as a "one and done" task. This is why having an evaluation strategy for a program, policy, or initiative is mission critical.
