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Case study 1: Evaluation
HealthWORKS North West
Summative evaluation of a virtual healthy living centre involving extensive partnership working in North West Newcastle.
This evaluation was commissioned by HealthWORKS North West in June 2005 and carried out between July and October the same year. The work involved undertaking a review of the work, progress and achievements of HealthWORKS North West since it began in 2001 and to help it plan for the immediate and longer term future.
The main areas covered were:
- governance and management;
- accountability to the community served; accountability to funders;
- measurement against the project's own performance indicators;
- relationships with other projects' initiatives and strategies;
- impact and outcomes: individuals and their communities; and
- good practice: evidence that the project has learnt from its experiences.
The evaluation involved surveys, interviews and focus groups with beneficiaries, grant holders, HealthWORKS North West staff, HealthWORKS North West Partnership, outside partners and other stakeholders, and desktop research. We wrote a 51 page report which is now a working document being used in the development of the project.
In this study we added to our knowledge of cross sector partnership working in a changing social and political environment, and of the value of a community development approach to health improvement. We found that one to one semi structured interviews were a particularly powerful tool. Our involvement became a stimulus for change even before we had reported; evaluation is a learning process for everyone involved and this project has encouraged us to develop the involvement of stakeholders in an active way.