HLTH 5003 Module 5 Program Evaluation and Leadership Plan Example

Did One Visit Replace Three? Evaluating a County's Integrated Family Health Clinic With the 2024 CDC Framework, and Leading Through Whatever It Finds

Student Name

American College of Education

HLTH5003: Leadership and Management in Public Health Organizations

Module 5 Assignment

Instructor Name

November 2, 2026

Why Evaluate, and for Whom

Over this course, the composite county health department has planned to bring its nutrition, vaccine and family planning services together in a single clinic, analyzed the leadership approach, the cultures being combined, the change plan and the team that will run the clinic. The final question is whether the merger works, and what the director should do with the answer. An evaluation that nobody uses is a report on a shelf; one that is used can improve the clinic, justify its funding and guide other departments considering the same move.

Several groups will use the findings: the health director and program managers, who must decide what to adjust; the board of health and county commissioners, who approved the change; the state WIC office and the federal family planning grant officer, who need assurance that program rules are still followed; staff, whose working lives the merger changed; and families, whose visits it was meant to improve.

The Framework

The department will use the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's updated program evaluation framework. Kidder et al. (2024) describe six steps: assess context, describe the program, focus the evaluation questions and design, gather credible evidence, generate and support conclusions, and act on findings. They add three cross-cutting actions to be carried through every step, engage collaboratively, advance equity, and learn from and use insights, and they align the framework with five federal evaluation standards: relevance and utility, rigor, independence and objectivity, transparency, and ethics. The framework is practical rather than prescriptive, which suits a local department with no evaluation unit of its own.

Context and Program Description

Assessing context means recognizing what shapes the clinic beyond its own design. Three separate funders each require their own reports and rules on staff time, the county's population is growing more linguistically diverse, and staffing across public health remains tight. Describing the program means stating its theory of change plainly. If families can receive all three services in one visit, with one check-in, protected privacy and staff who can cover for each other, then they will make fewer trips, miss fewer WIC certifications and vaccine doses, and rate their care as more respectful. The department will draw this as a logic model linking inputs, such as cross-trained staff and a shared schedule, to activities, outputs and outcomes.

Questions and Design

Four evaluation questions follow from the theory of change. Was the integrated model delivered as planned, including private check-in and cross-trained backup? Did families need fewer visits and miss fewer services? Did families of every language group experience the change as respectful and private? And what did the change cost in staff time, turnover and money compared with the three separate clinics?

The evaluation compares the year before opening with the year after, using twelve months of baseline data from the three clinics and twelve months after opening, displayed monthly so that trends are visible rather than hidden in annual averages. Because other changes could affect the numbers, such as a new state WIC policy, the evaluation will also track the same measures at a neighboring county's separate clinics, which provides a rough comparison. Implementation will be judged with outcomes of the kind Proctor et al. (2011) proposed for implementation research, including fidelity, the extent to which the model was delivered as intended, and penetration, the share of eligible families who actually receive all their services in one visit.

Credible Evidence and Equity

Evidence will come from four sources: scheduling records for visits, services and missed appointments; program data systems for WIC certifications and immunization status; a short family survey on privacy, respect and ease of the visit, offered in the county's four main languages; and staff surveys and focus groups at months three and nine. Every measure will be reported by language group, age of child and program mix, which is how the framework's equity action will be carried out in practice. An average improvement that hides a group of Haitian Creole-speaking families waiting longer than before would not be a success. Families from the WIC advisory group will review the survey questions and help interpret the results, so that the evaluation is done with families and not only about them.

Generating and Supporting Conclusions

Numbers will not interpret themselves, and the framework's fifth step asks how conclusions will be reached and defended. The evaluation team, made up of the quality coordinator, a university partner, one staff member from each former program and two parents from the advisory group, will meet after each reporting period to review the charts and survey results together. They will judge change against the baseline trend rather than against a single month, since clinic volume varies with the school year and flu season. They will look for convergence: a real improvement should appear in scheduling records, in program data and in what families say, not in one source alone. Where sources disagree, for example if records show fewer visits but families report more waiting, the team will treat the disagreement as a finding to investigate rather than choose the more flattering number. Every conclusion in the report will state the evidence behind it and how confident the team is, and the draft will be shared with staff before it goes to the board, so that people who know the work can correct misreadings.

Leading Through the Findings

The last step of the framework, acting on findings, is where evaluation becomes leadership. The director should prepare for three kinds of result before the data arrive. If the findings are positive, the task is to hold the gains and share credit, reporting to the board and funders, recognizing the staff who made the model work and documenting it so that other departments can learn from it. If they are mixed, for example fewer visits overall but lower privacy ratings among family planning patients, the task is to act visibly on the weak spot, involving the staff and families who raised it, rather than defending the model. If the findings are negative, the director must say so plainly, explain what will change, and be willing to reverse parts of the merger that are not working. Research on change consistently points to the value of consolidating early gains and adjusting as evidence arrives (Stouten et al., 2018), and staff will judge the leadership less by the results than by how honestly they are handled.

Standards and Timeline

The evaluation will be held to the framework's standards. For relevance and utility, each question is tied to a decision someone will make. For rigor, measures and the comparison county are defined before opening. For independence and objectivity, the survey and focus groups will be run by the state university's public health program rather than by the managers being evaluated. For transparency, results, including unfavorable ones, will be posted for staff and presented to the board. For ethics, survey responses will be confidential and family planning data handled under the program's privacy rules. Results will be reported at months three, six and twelve after opening, and the twelve-month report will include a recommendation on whether to keep, adjust or partly reverse the integrated model.

References

Kidder, D. P., Fierro, L. A., Luna, E., Salvaggio, H., McWhorter, A., Bowen, S.-A., Murphy-Hoefer, R., Thigpen, S., Alexander, D., Armstead, T. L., August, E., Bruce, D., Clarke, S. N., Davis, C., Downes, A., Gill, S., House, L. D., Kerzner, M., Kun, K., ... Young, K. (2024). CDC program evaluation framework, 2024. MMWR Recommendations and Reports, 73(6), 1-37. https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.rr7306a1

Proctor, E., Silmere, H., Raghavan, R., Hovmand, P., Aarons, G., Bunger, A., Griffey, R., & Hensley, M. (2011). Outcomes for implementation research: Conceptual distinctions, measurement challenges, and research agenda. Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, 38(2), 65-76. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10488-010-0319-7

Stouten, J., Rousseau, D. M., & De Cremer, D. (2018). Successful organizational change: Integrating the management practice and scholarly literatures. Academy of Management Annals, 12(2), 752-788. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2016.0095