aes19 International Evaluation Conference

Lisa Jackson Pulver (Health Performance Council of South  Australia; University of Sydney), Andrew Wineberg (Health Performance Council Secretariat)

The various state-run health services in South Australia are charged with implementing 'an effective consumer engagement system'. In 2015, one of the state's several local health networks published a strategy for engagement with its Aboriginal consumers and community members. As part of our remit to review the effectiveness of our state's community engagement methods, we decided to evaluate how well that engagement strategy had been implemented.

As the strategy we were evaluating was about Aboriginal health consumers and community members, we recognised early that they themselves would best have the experience and legitimacy necessary to guide our review. We therefore set up a governing advisory group made up of people with a strong mix of Aboriginal health perspectives, including - crucially - members of the very same grass roots Aboriginal community register that was itself the flagship creation of the strategy being evaluated.

In this session, we will introduce our project governance and the creation of our Aboriginal advisory group and explain the lengthy but worthwhile collaborative process our group then used to create an evaluation logic model and to design the evaluation. We will explain how our advisory group provided strong governance for the substantive components of the evaluation, including their advice on protecting Aboriginal cultural property by procuring external expert assistance from a majority Aboriginal social research firm to undertake primary data collection. Finally, we will present the iterative validation process we used to prove and refine our draft findings and results to ensure that they resonated with the community.

This session is a must-see for anyone interested in making their evaluations of community targeted strategies truly collaborative and empowering, giving ownership and validity to the community that are the prime stakeholders in a strategy under study.