Making the most of policy evaluations: Overview and synthesis of evaluation of the white paper 'Our health, Our care, Our say'

Summary
Ailsa Cameron and Dr Rachel Lart are working on this project with colleagues from Primary Health Care in the Department of Community Based Medicine.

The White Paper ‘Our health, our care, our say’ sets out a number of policy goals to make health and social care more responsive to peoples’ needs, with better prevention of ill-health, better access to care, and more support for people with long-term needs. A number of pilot projects have been established to achieve these aims, and these are subject to evaluation. This project seeks to synthesise findings from the evaluations about specific initiatives and the wider policy goals, and to increase understanding about how to make best use of evaluation in order to support policy development and implementation.

Aims
1. To synthesise findings from evaluation of specific White Paper initiatives to determine the extent to which initiatives have achieved their objectives and ways in which the initiative can be improved.
2. To synthesise findings from evaluation of different initiatives to determine the extent to which overall policy goals of the White Paper are met.
3. To increase understanding of the most effective ways of conducting evaluation of innovations in delivery of health and social care in order to generate findings which are useful to inform policy.
4. To support evaluations of White Paper initiatives in order to maximise the quality, usefulness and comparability of their findings.