Challenges In Monitoring And Evaluation Of Public Health Programs Essay.

A description of the issue you will discuss including reference to the texts (e.g. articles, books, video’s etc.) that have most influenced your thinking on the topic;

Discussion of the relevance of the issue for public health practice drawing on your reading and reflections from your own experience/observations if possible;

Discussion

The multiple disciplines of the biology, medicine, anthropology, public health and education comprises of public health practice, which has immense importance in serving mankind (Friis& Sellers, 2013). I have observed that there are effective public health practices that are designed, however, they are not channelized properly due to lack of leadership efforts. This is the reason I feel that in order to have good public health outcomes, it is important to demonstrate effective leadership in the domain. This would lead to increased community outcomes so that there is increased disease prevention, increased education and more enhancement of the present policy development.

The leaders are the persons with distant vision as well as they are known for good team building (Popescu & Predescu, 2016). It is important for the public health programs to display effective leadership so that they have a good outcome. The leaders have the power to properly execute a public health program so that there is good outcome (Fitzgerald et al., 2013). I can understand the fact that the effective leadership would improve the health outcomes of the society. I have witnessed the fact that the challenges of the public program leadership lay in equity as well as prevention of the health services. The leadership issues have led to an increase in the problems of the availability of the vaccines. The vaccine is important for decreasing the disease burden of the community (Feikin, Scott & Gessner, 2014). However, I have observed that the vaccines for major diseases are not available in every part of the world, especially in rural areas. I have done sufficient research on this field and have found out that there are several issues in the small pox vaccine availability. This can be attributed to the lack of leadership in this domain and the healthcare leaders have failed to make the essential vaccine available to all. After going through all these facts, I have selected this particular topic and advise some measures so that there is an overall increase in the public health leadership.

The leadership skills in healthcare are important for improving the managed care as well as promotion of integrated delivery system (Stanhope et al., 2015). I am aware of the fact that leadership behavior is instrumental in guiding the organizational behavior and cultivating more inter-organizational relationships. I have seen that the leaders should be able to apply their scientific knowledge to the problems of public health. I have realized that they should try to create as well as sustain the different levels of community coalitions. I have realized the fact that the public health leadership is important for the areas in the areas of disease intervention such as HIV, Ebola and other. The public health leaders can help in minimizing the level of infection in the community and decreasing the disease burden of the society (Wager, Lee & Glaser, 2017). I have also realized the fact that the public health leadership would be required in the areas of public health research and increasing the overall awareness of the community. At present, there is inadequate leadership, which leads to global health epidemics.

Relevance of monitoring and evaluation in public health programs

I have realized the fact that the public health leadership can make important contributions to this field. I am sure that the leadership would be helpful in the areas where inadequate presence of the public health is. In the rural areas of the developing countries, it is important to display adequate levels of the leadership that would help in the more penetration of the public health services. I feel that this would lead to more utilization of the health services by the community. I am sure that this increased awareness would lead to an increased technical as well as systematic integration of the public health programs. I feel that building on the skills of the public health leaders would mean an increased health for all, especially for the economic and social backward classes of the society.

Conclusion

There is enough scope of development of the public health leadership, which is deeply concerned with the development of the shared vision and the creation of an effective leadership competency framework. I have understood the fact that healthcare leadership would be important for improving the public health condition of the community. It is important to provide adequate leadership to the public health programs so that it reaches its desired level. It would also likely to increase the public health effectiveness in the society.

The monitoring and the evaluation function of the health programs do face several challenges. The main objective of the various public health campaigns is to put a control on disease outbreak and reduction of the instances of injury, disability and death. I have observed that the current state of monitoring and evaluation is not proper and hence I have decided that it is important to ponder over the issue. I also feel that it is important to understand the perceptions of the different stakeholders associated with this process.

I have realized that there are several loopholes in the monitoring as well as evaluation process of the health programs. I have realized that there is lack of experience of the health staffs regarding the public health programs. The public health programs lack proper monitoring and evaluation tools, which poses difficulty for program evaluation (Vedung, 2017). There is a lack of adequate manpower as well as well as financial resources that would be required for the evaluation purposes (Brownson, 2017). I have also seen that there are certain gaps in the technical knowledge of the staffs with a degree of confusion regarding the performance indicators. I have witnessed the fact that there are issues with the retrieval, collection, preparation and the interpretation of data concerning the public health programs. There are issues with the allocation of sufficient resources, which often is a problem for the public health programs. The monitoring and evaluation function may be impossible to carry out since there are not sufficient budget allocated for this purpose.

The systematic evaluation and monitoring of the process is responsible for the increase of the efficiency of the planning process as well as implementation of measures required for fulfillment of program objectives (Issel & Wells, 2017). I have felt that there is lack of comparable definitions regarding the prevalence of diseases across the public health domain. The monitoring and the evaluation process focus on the processes, outcomes and impact of the program, which is important for the success of the program. It is also important to understand the changes that have been inflicted by the public health program. I have seen that it is important for the community based management and understand the overall impact of the public health programs. The value of the public health initiatives is usually measured by the cost efficiency as well as impact on the community, which I think is not done properly. I have seen that there are often issues with the interpretation of data, which requires significant expertise.

There are several implications of the evaluation of the public health initiatives. I have seen that there are no monitoring techniques present in this domain, which makes it difficult to outcomes of the program (Eldredge et al., 2016). I have felt that the public health expenditure would be wasted if there is improper monitoring and evaluation technique. I also feel that if there is no proper data collection, then the health gaps in the community cannot be measured. This would also cause a lack of evaluation of the improvement of the health care services (Cameron et al., 2014). I also feel that it should be monitored about the individual strategies as well as observed outcomes should be recorded well. I have seen several multisector interventions and integrated programs in which it becomes imperative to understand the effectiveness of the program. Hence, I have decided on the thought that it is important to learn about the various techniques of monitoring and evaluation process, which would help in better health outcomes.

Conclusion:

The monitoring and the evaluation function is directly proportional to the success of the program. The monitoring of the health programs is important for measuring the success of the health programs. The monitoring methods should be carefully implemented and it is also important to know their correct usage. It is important to allocate significant budget for this purpose so that the monitoring process can be carried easily. There should be more attention given to the evaluation function so that it is possible to identify the loopholes. This would help in improving the next set of public health programs.

References for Topic 1

Feikin, D. R., Scott, J. A. G., & Gessner, B. D. (2014). Use of vaccines as probes to define disease burden. The Lancet, 383(9930), 1762-1770.

Fitzgerald, L., Ferlie, E., McGivern, G., & Buchanan, D. (2013). Distributed leadership patterns and service improvement: Evidence and argument from English healthcare. The Leadership Quarterly, 24(1), 227-239.

Friis, R. H., & Sellers, T. (2013). Epidemiology for public health practice. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.

Popescu, G. H., &Predescu, V. (2016). The role of leadership in public health. American Journal of Medical Research, 3(1), 273-273.

Stanhope, V., Videka, L., Thorning, H., & McKay, M. (2015). Moving toward integrated health: An opportunity for social work. Social work in health care, 54(5), 383-407.

Wager, K. A., Lee, F. W., & Glaser, J. P. (2017). Health care information systems: a practical approach for health care management. John Wiley & Sons.

Callahan, R., & Bhattacharya, D. (2017). Public Health Leadership: Strategies for Innovation in Population Health and Social Determinants. Routledge.

Day, M., Shickle, D., Smith, K., Zakariasen, K., Moskol, J., & Oliver, T. (2014). Training public health superheroes: five talents for public health leadership. Journal of Public Health, 36(4), 552-561.

Rowitz, L. (2013). Public health leadership. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.

Smith, T., Stankunas, M., Czabanowska, K., De Jong, N., O'Connor, S. J., & Fowler Davis, S. (2015). Principles of all-inclusive public health: developing a public health leadership curriculum. Public health, 129(2), 182-184.

References for Topic 2

Brownson, R. C., Baker, E. A., Deshpande, A. D., & Gillespie, K. N. (2017). Evidence-based public health. Oxford University Press.

Cameron, A., Lart, R., Bostock, L., & Coomber, C. (2014). Factors that promote and hinder joint and integrated working between health and social care services: a review of research literature. Health & social care in the community, 22(3), 225-233.

Eldredge, L. K. B., Markham, C. M., Ruiter, R. A., Kok, G., & Parcel, G. S. (2016). Planning health promotion programs: an intervention mapping approach. John Wiley & Sons.

Issel, L. M., & Wells, R. (2017). Health program planning and evaluation. Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Vedung, E. (2017). Public policy and program evaluation. Routledge.

Bowling, A. (2014). Research methods in health: investigating health and health services. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).

Drummond, M. F., Sculpher, M. J., Claxton, K., Stoddart, G. L., & Torrance, G. W. (2015). Methods for the economic evaluation of health care programmes. Oxford university press.

Mills, A. (2014). Health care systems in low-and middle-income countries. New England Journal of Medicine, 370(6), 552-557.

Oleske, D. M. (2014). Epidemiology and the delivery of health care services. Springer.

World Health Organization. (2015). Guide to Monitoring and Evaluation for Collaborative TB/HIV Activities--2015 Update. World Health Organization.