Workshop: How to commission policy and program evaluations

Thinking of planning or commissioning an evaluation of a policy or program? Do you want to align your evaluation with the most effective approaches?

The Sax Institute invites you to a workshop with a world leader in designing policy evaluation that is feasible in real world policy contexts.

This 3-hour workshop will identify common challenges with commissioning evaluations and it will address the importance of having a clear rationale, purpose, and audience for an evaluation. It will consider approaches to support commissioning evaluations such as constructing an intervention logic, assessing feasibility, raising awareness of the complexity of evaluation and communicating evaluation findings.

The Workshop will be led by Professor Nicholas Mays, who directs the Policy Innovation Research Unit at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Professor Mays has held senior roles in both government departments and in academia, with extensive experience in evaluating government policies and programs. He will draw on his extensive experience of working in government and his expertise in conducting national level evaluations at the national level in health and social care in England.

At the end of this Workshop participants will be able to:

• Relate the evaluation design to the purpose of the policy or program

• Identify how the findings could be used

• Understand the implications of different evaluation approaches

Who should attend?

This workshop will be of interest to those working in policy or program agencies such as government departments or non-government organisations.

About the presenter

Professor Mays is the Professor of Health Policy, Department of Health Services Research and Policy, in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Nicholas has extensive experience in health policy and health services research, holding positions in the National Health Service and at the Universities of Leicester and London and the Queen’s University of Belfast. He has worked in the independent sector with the King’s Fund, where he was the Director of Health Services Research and as a policy adviser with the New Zealand Treasury for five years.

Professor Mays current directs the Policy Research Innovation Research Unit, funded by the Policy Research Programme of the Department of Health in England. The Unit aims to strengthen early policy development by exploiting the best routine data and by subjecting initiatives to speedy thorough evaluation. It also helps to build evidence for policy, strengthen evaluation and support implementation.

Examples of PIRU’s work include evaluations of the Public Health Responsibility Deal, the National Cold Weather Plan, the General Practice Patient Choice Pilot, the Social Impact Bond Trailblazers, Direct Payment in Residential Care Pilots and Integrated Care Pioneers, as well as methodological work to improve the handling of selection bias in quasi-experimental evaluations using improved methods of matching. The Unit is also studying the ways in which evaluations of pilots are commissioned, designed and used in health and social care in England.

Professor Mays continues to maintain a direct involvement in health and wider social policy making by proving periodic advice to the New Zealand Ministry of Health and Treasury.

Click here to read the Registration Terms and Conditions