aes19 International Evaluation Conference

Takara Tsuzaki  (Western Michigan University)

This presentation demonstrates a case study of a mixed method and bilingual program evaluation which was conducted on a newly launched rural medicine/rural generalist program in Japan with a focus on collaborative and iterative learning processes. The client, GENEPRO LLC and the evaluator will share challenges in designing and implementing the evaluation, and how we have been successful in building trust among stakeholders, integrating evaluation into practice, and fostering iterative learning within the organization.

The model - Rural Generalist Program Japan (RGPJ) - is based on the Australian model which has been regarded as the most comprehensive and matured rural generalist medicine training scheme in the world. To meet the specific needs of rural generalist medicine in Japan, provision of rural healthcare was needed to be tailored to regional and local context. Exporting this medical training scheme from Australia to Japan also meant a new collaborative endeavor to develop a unique program evaluation model and approach in Japan.

This presentation will highlight the contextual differences between the East and the West in terms of philosophies and cultural values and how they are manifest in the evaluation practices. The concept of both the theoretical and practical evaluation has developed differently in Japan in the past 50 years when it is compared to the West. Furthermore, evaluation has been conducted predominantly using quantitative data in the medical and healthcare sector in Japan. However, the rural generalist medicine requires distinctly broad scope of practice as well as unique combination of abilities and aptitude to respond to the community needs of rural and remote areas of Japan. As a result, the evaluation approach, including the underlying values, philosophies and methodologies had to be thoroughly examined and openly discussed to bring all the stakeholders on board.

We will share the lessons from the collaborative evaluation process by discussing: what the evaluative thinking and collaborative evaluation design mean in the Japanese rural and medical settings; how we have come up with innovative approaches to communicate with stakeholders who have evaluation anxiety and fear of modernist undertaking; how we have acknowledged and overcome (in)translatability issues in languages, imbedded values, and social contexts of each stakeholder groups; and how the collaborative evaluation processes impacted the organizational culture during and after the evaluation.