LIST OF PANELS

This workshop aims to provide space to discuss how best to ensure that complex evaluations respond to the needs of diverse stakeholders, including policymakers, implementers, community members and end users. 

The workshop will respond to the following questions:

1.            What are the ethical considerations present when conducting complex evaluations in health?  Who has the obligation to respond to these (evaluators, implementers, evaluation commissioners etc)?

2.            How can effective stakeholder management be undertaken to facilitate the use of evidence in public health policy?

3.            What guidance exists for the use of innovative methods in evaluation?  How can these be applied to complex evaluations?

Health program evaluation is recognised as a crucial tool in building the evidence base for appropriate and responsive public health policy.  Despite this, evaluation is frequently overlooked, seen as an add-on rather than central to health policy and program design, or undertaken in such a way that it does not fulfil its potential to contribute to the available body of evidence.  Compounding this, interventions to address public health priorities are increasingly complex, leading to a need for expertise in the development and design of complex evaluations.

This workshop will focus on the question of how to design evaluations of complex initiatives, programs and policies to improve public health policy and practice.  In particular, we aim to provide space to discuss how best to ensure that complex evaluations respond to the needs of diverse stakeholders, including policymakers, implementers, community members and end users. 

This workshop is designed to foster a community of scholars working on the evaluation of complex health programs, policies and initiatives.   As such, the workshop will bring together academics undertaking evaluation in a variety of public health fields as well as experts in the science of evaluation.  Papers relating to the evaluation of health programs in Latin America or in fields of particular relevance to Latin America (e.g. communicable disease control in low to middle resource settings, achieving health equity, regional approaches to transnational health threats) are especially welcome.

We envision papers centered around (but not limited to) the following themes:

• The ethics of evaluation

• Stakeholder engagement for effective application

• Use of innovative methods in evaluation, including participatory evaluation design and methods

Papers developed successfully as a result of the workshop will be invited to participate in one or more special issue(s) in relevant internationally ranked journals.