Women’s health network evaluation support for Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes (BLMK)

Health Innovation East is supporting the Women’s Health Network in Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes (BLMK) to develop its evaluation framework.

Background

Health Innovation East is supporting Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes (BLMK) Womens Health Network to develop their evaluation framework. The BLMK Womens Health Network aligns with the Women’s Health Strategy for England, which sets out 10 strategic aims across three key domains:

  • Women and girls
  • Health and care workforce
  • Wider health system

Five pilot projects are being funded through the programme, each designed to reflect and implement these national priorities.

Project Aims

This project aimed to support development of an appropriate approach to evaluate the pilots and to provide a structured evaluation framework that facilitates standardisation in evaluation across the current five pilot projects funded, and is sustainable for future pilots funded through the programme.

Project Activity

  • Identified the intended activities, mechanisms of change and outcomes of each pilot by reviewing and synthesising existing documentation shared by each pilot.
  • Identified commonalities, differences, gaps in the outcomes to inform a framework of outcomes for each pilot to report against
  • Cross referenced to programme/commissioner and any national women's health network requirements for reporting
  • Cross referenced the framework against data currently being captured by pilots to identify any additional data collection needs
  • Agreed final framework of evaluation measures to be used by pilots within the programme

Outputs

ARC funding in collaboration with Health Innovation East supported through providing advise, guidance and additional research capacity to system partners in Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes ICB, and a ST3 in Community Sexual and Reproductive Health on a public health rotation, to evaluate 5 pilots funded through the Women's Health Network programme. This additional support allowed us to: collaboratively develop an evaluation framework that can be used by system partners now and beyond the period of additional support; evaluate the initial data collected by each of the pilots; conduct and analyse stakeholder conversations with each pilot lead to understand their experiences of implementing the pilots; and to provide an evaluation report to support the business case for ongoing funding and commissioning of the programme. A key component was collaborating with the ST3 and pilot leads to build capacity for and understanding of evaluation, logic models and qualitative methods.

The evaluation report has been shared with the stakeholders involved in delivering and commissioning projects as part of the Women’s Health Network programme – this will be shared via ARC and Health Innovation East website/communication channels once we receive ICB sign off (likely longer time frame due to shift to Central East ICB).

Who was involved?

  • Judith Fynn, Health Innovation East
  • Sanhita Chakrabarti, Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes (BLMK)

Contact

Judith Fynn, judith.fynn@healthinnovationeast.co.uk

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