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:
- Do things better
- Make decisions on evidence as opposed to intuition
- Pull evidence-based best practices and test them in a field environment
- Adequately allocate resources
- 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.
Visit the
HP Metrics & Evaluation Branch page to learn more about DCPH-A driven program evaluation and how you can get involved.
