What to expect when you're evaluating healthcare improvement: a concordat approach to managing collaboration and uncomfortable realities.

ABSTRACT: Evaluation of improvement initiatives in healthcare is essential to establishing whether interventions are effective and to understanding how and why they work in order to enable replication. Although valuable, evaluation is often complicated by tensions and friction between evaluators, implementers and other stakeholders. Drawing on the literature, we suggest that these tensions can arise from a lack of shared understanding of the goals of the evaluation; confusion about roles, relationships and responsibilities; data burdens; issues of data flows and confidentiality; the discomforts of being studied and the impact of disappointing or otherwise unwelcome results. We present a possible approach to managing these tensions involving the co-production and use of a concordat. We describe how w

SUBMITTER: Brewster L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4413682 | biostudies-literature | 2015 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature