The evaluation of Vancouver Coastal Health's strategic plan to reduce head injuries on the North Shore: how does it measure up to accepted standards?

In 2010, Vancouver Coastal Health’s (VCH) North Shore (NS) division and the NS Injury Prevention Community Action Committee created a Strategic Plan to reduce head injuries on the NS, but planning for an evaluation of the program was not completed. Evaluation is a vital component in any public health program and this project aims to generate an evaluation for VCH’s Strategic Plan. This project outlines what program evaluation entails, including the types, steps and standards of evaluation. It considers the components of previous injury prevention program evaluations to better inform the design of an appropriate evaluation for the head injury program. The paper presents an evaluation plan based on Patton’s utilization-focused approach (Patton 2008) and designed using the US Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) evaluation framework. The evaluation plan is then examined against the CDC’s four evaluation standards recommended by the CDC: utility, feasibility, propriety, and accuracy.