State of Prevention in Allied Health Education and Practice, The

Journal of Allied Health, Fall 2004 by Sportsman, Susan, Hawley, Linda J, Bowles, Betty

Evaluation of the Project

The evaluation of this project focused on four areas: (1) demographic data describing participation in the programs, (2) satisfaction of participants with various aspects of the programs, (3) the extent to which participants were aware of the PPIP Initiative before the class, and (4) perceived barriers and facilitators to implementation of the PPIP Initiative into participants' work sites. During the 15 months of the project, 284 health care providers in a 27-county area in north-central Texas participated in the program. Of the participants, 53% worked in rural areas. Thirty-two percent worked in acute care facilities, 28% in long-term care, and 23% in other settings (clinics, colleges/universities, or regulatory agencies); 17% did not give their place of employment. The participants' disciplines included registered nurses (37%); licensed vocational nurses (22%); social workers (22%); nursing home administrators (5%); and respiratory care professionals, physical therapists, occupational therapists, and others (14%). The demographics suggest that participants sufficiently interested in prevention to attend the program were diverse in terms of their geographic location, discipline, and practice site.

The satisfaction of the participants was evaluated using a program-specific evaluation instrument that asked participants to rate the extent to which each of the objectives of the programs were met according to a 4-point scale from completely to not at all. Participants also used a 4-point scale to rate (1) the expertise of individual presenters, (2) the relationship of objectives to the overall goal of the program, (3) the effectiveness of teaching strategies, and (4) the appropriateness of physical facilities. The participants rated all aspects positively, with an average of 95% of the respondents indicating that the objectives were completely met and presenters and facilities were satisfactory or excellent.

During the evaluation process, participants were asked to record whether or not they were aware of the PPIP Initiative before the class. Most of the participants had not heard of PPIP before attending. In 3 of the 10 classes, none of the participants had ever heard of the initiative. Registered nurse participants were no more likely to have heard of this initiative than other disciplines. Table 2 provides an overview of the percentage of participants in each class who had not heard of PPIP. This lack of awareness was consistent with the experience of the college faculty involved in the grant at the beginning of the project. Although many of the faculty recruited to participate in the project reported familiarity with prevention in general, none were familiar with the PPIP Initiative before the project orientation.

Given the reported difficulty in integrating the PPIP Initiative into the primary care setting, we speculated that introducing PPIP into acute care and long-term care settings might be particularly challenging. We were interested in determining the perceived barriers and facilitators to implementation participants would identify as existing in their own work environments. At the end of each day-long class, a representative group of participants spent an additional hour as a focus group to identify barriers and facilitators to integrating the PPIP Initiative into their own work site. The themes of these responses were similar across all of the classes, regardless of the work environment or disciplines of the participants, and included (1) resource issues, (2) interpersonal support, (3) available systems, (4) psychosocial issues, and (5) patient issues. Table 3 outlines specific barriers and facilitators identified throughout the project.