Projects » Health Program Evaluations

The Border Health Initiative, funded by the California Endowment, has brought together public health and non-governmental, community-based organizations in addressing locally defined health concerns. In addition to having a role on the evaluation team, PRA has also developed and delivered a four-session, evaluation capacity building workshop. The workshops were conducted in San Diego, Tijuana and Mexicali Mexico.

The California School Health Centers Association (CSHC) promotes the health and academic success of children and youth by increasing access to the high quality health care and support services provided by school health centers. With a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, CSHC is working with five community partners across California to promote the health of children, adolescents, and their families by developing their capacity to mobilize and engage communities and exploring models that financially secure the future of school-based health centers. PRA is conducting a formative evaluation of the effectiveness of the technical assistance services and policy/advocacy provided by the CSHC to school-based health centers statewide. This formative evaluation involves telephone interviews with a random sample of the membership base. PRA is also assessing the capacity of the partnering school-based health centers to engage youth and the community in making policy changes. In doing so, PRA has assisted CSHC in developing and administering tools to assess the communities’ capacity in the areas of: 1) effective communications; 2) developing partnerships; 3) advocacy; and 4) community engagement.

The Community Action to Fight Asthma Initiative (CAFA), funded in March 2002 by The California Endowment, is an attempt to fight trends toward high asthma-related mortality and morbidity by preventing and reducing exposure to environmental asthma triggers among school-age children in California. This initiative is designed as a multifaceted community-based intervention, including actions at the local, regional, and state levels. The project includes 12 local coalitions and four regional centers located throughout California. PRA, in partnership with University of California San Francisco (UCSF), developed an evaluation that tracked coalition growth from education-based entities to organizations that organized and implemented policy/advocacy activity. As part of the initiative, we helped the California Endowment design and implement a quarterly reporting system that allowed them to monitor program activity. Using social networking methods, we collected information that helped us assess networking and communication between the initiative's partners.

The Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center has been working with PRA to analyze data on their clients and outcomes from available records systems but also to create an overall evaluation plan for the Center. As part of this work, PRA has been developing a logic model for the Center's work and reviewing literature on models for health care delivery.

The New York State Department of Health - The Office of Minority Health funds four community coalitions which address racial and ethnic health disparities. In an effort to build evaluation capacity within each coalition, PRA is conducting an assets and needs assessment of each coalition, and based on that assessment, conducting training workshops and technical assistance. At the end of the training, each coalition will emerge with an evaluation manual consisting of a logic model for their program, data collection plans and timelines, and all the instruments needed to carry out the evaluation. Our training, technical assistance, coaching, facilitating and encouraging activities will continue over the course of the four-year project.

Peer Health Exchange, Inc. - The mission of PHE is to give teenagers the knowledge and skills they need to make healthy decisions. They do this by training college students to teach a comprehensive health curriculum in public high schools that lack health education. PRA is currently evaluating this curriculum in New York City, Boston, and Chicago.