Epidemiology for planning the future:
XLI Annual Scientific Meeting of the Spanish Society of Epidemiology (SEE) and the XVIII Congress of the Portuguese Association of Epidemiology (APE)
Preliminary Congress Programme incl. registration information
JADECARE’s accepted contribution is titled: Evaluation of the Impact of Joint Actions on Decision-Making in Public Health: A Scoping Review (Speaker: José María Castellano García, )
Background/Objectives: Joint Actions (JA) are a financing instrument under the EU Health Programme that involves the participation of various member states to implement priority actions. Evaluating the impact of any initiative funded by public funds is important for accountability, but it can be challenging. The objectives of this study were to determine the approaches and impact evaluation methodologies used in JAs in public health and to identify the facilitators and obstacles to impact on public policies.
Methods: A rapid scoping review of the last 20 years was conducted, identifying a total of 19 articles on JAs in the Pubmed/Medline (n=13) and Google Scholar (n=6) databases. Additionally, the websites of finished public health JAs (n=40) from 2003 to 2022 were reviewed through the European Commission website.
Results: The results show that, in general, the articles focus more on the project results rather than its impact. The projects that show impact mostly use qualitative evaluation approaches, such as Delphi techniques, interviews with expert groups, consensus exercises, and opinions, rather than standardized quantitative data analysis and indicators. The facilitators for their impact on public policy include articles that provide clear and evidence-based results and evaluation approaches that consider the viewpoints of different stakeholders. The obstacles include less attention to the impact rather than project content, a huge variety of evaluation frameworks, and many qualitative-based approaches.
Conclusions/Recommendations: Efforts should be made to evaluate the impact of projects through data analysis and evaluation that takes into account all project stakeholders. This would allow for clearer and more precise results and ensure greater impact on public health policies.