Download the full Evaluation Guide as a pdf documentAnnex 3
Your Health, Your Care, Your Say - a case example of evaluation1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9
Introduction
This annex provides a worked example, using the evaluation framework outlined in the main part of this document, covering the evaluation of the Your Health, Your Care, Your Say (YHYCYS) initiative.
The YHYCYS initiative for the Department of Health was one of the largest and most ambitious public engagement exercises ever mounted in the UK. It was designed to ensure public engagement in the development of a government White Paper on health and social care services in the UK. Over 41,000 responses were received through various engagement methods over the three months that the main work took place (September to December 2005), with 1,240 people attending deliberative events in Gateshead, Plymouth, London, Leicester and Birmingham.
This annex describes the evaluation process - the full findings and results of the evaluation can be examined in the full and summary reports of the evaluation on the Department of Health , or the Shared Practice.
The policy cycle
The YHYCYS engagement was designed to contribute to the agenda-setting and to shape and discuss policy proposals (see diagram on page 4, for the policy cycle).
Thinking about objectives
The YHYCYS initiative had three explicit objectives that were agreed at the start:
- For the public, providers of care and government to work in partnership to determine policy priorities and design new approaches to future care.
- To increase levels of public engagement in the policy decision making process.
- To produce a public debate visible at local and national levels around the future of personalised and community centred care.
There had also been an implicit objective, as the evaluation brief pointed out that the particular approach used (a version of the America Speaks method) was chosen "as it was felt that it would make some contribution to enhancing trust in government, by reinvigorating public debate, and lead to better public sector service provision, by addressing the needs and concerns of service uses and providers".
The brief recognised the difficulties of finding appropriate indicators for issues such as enhanced trust in government, especially in identifying clear cause and effect links between a particular exercise and such broad, complex and long term changes in relationships between government and citizens.
On the spectrum of public influence (see page 7 of the evaluation framework), the YHYCYS objectives suggest that it aimed for a 'collaborate' level of public influence. However, the methods chosen to provide the greatest depth of involvement (the deliberative research workshops), resulted in an 'involve' level.
In the past, there have been value judgements associated with 'higher' or 'lower' levels of public influence in engagement processes, but it is now widely recognised that the important assessment is whether the level of influence achieved is appropriate to the purpose. In this case, the evaluation concluded that, although the original objective of partnership had not been met, it was probably unrealistic in the circumstances to aim to achieve partnership (especially given the timescale and the scale of the exercise), and that the 'involve' level had been fully delivered, including to the satisfaction of participants.