Issues Needed to Be Considered When Planning an Evaluation of an Environmental Health Service Plan
Environmental health services and programs are now widely found in every community throughout Australia. These services and programs focus on the health and wellbeing of every individual within that community. They include partnerships formed within all levels of government, with communities and industries, research and education industries, as well as with government and environmental health and health work forces (DoH 1999, p. 1). Environmental health programs can focus around issues such as immunisation, hygiene, noise control and transmissible diseases. However, it is important that all these health services and programs undergo some form of evaluation. These evaluations would be able to give a determination as to whether the service or program is being enforced, is effective, identifying the successes and barriers as well as determining the value of both the service or program and the evaluation itself. Therefore there are certain key issues that would need to be addressed when planning an evaluation of an environmental health service or program.
In the book Evaluation Thesaurus written by Michael Scriven (1991), evaluation is defined as the determination of the “merit, worth and value of things, and evaluations are the products of that process”. Thus evaluation is an important aspect in gaining positive outcomes of an environmental health service or program. Each health service or program has a distinctive way that they would need to be evaluated. When planning an evaluation a fundamental issue that needs to be covered is to simply understand what the health service or program involves and provides. This can be addressed by forming a proposal, which is a helpful way to approach the planning of an evaluation. It can provide answers to basic questions of the health service or program that is to be evaluated (Holden, D & Zimmerman, M 2008). In this proposal key issues that are determined involve: whether the health service or program is at all useful, how
In the book Evaluation Thesaurus written by Michael Scriven (1991), evaluation is defined as the determination of the “merit, worth and value of things, and evaluations are the products of that process”. Thus evaluation is an important aspect in gaining positive outcomes of an environmental health service or program. Each health service or program has a distinctive way that they would need to be evaluated. When planning an evaluation a fundamental issue that needs to be covered is to simply understand what the health service or program involves and provides. This can be addressed by forming a proposal, which is a helpful way to approach the planning of an evaluation. It can provide answers to basic questions of the health service or program that is to be evaluated (Holden, D & Zimmerman, M 2008). In this proposal key issues that are determined involve: whether the health service or program is at all useful, how