How can hospitals and communities strengthen pediatric disaster response?

Challenge

The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) has funded the Regional Pediatric Pandemic Network (RPPN) to coordinate among the nation’s children’s hospitals and their communities in preparing for and responding to global health threats. The RPPN is a network of 10 children’s hospitals each with additional networks of health care systems, community partners, and subject matter experts. The aim of the RPPN is to help all children’s hospitals in the nation advance everyday emergency pediatric readiness and disaster preparedness in partnership with their communities to ensure health equity.

HRSA hired Westat to plan a meaningful and feasible external evaluation of the RPPN—a network functioning as a complex health services intervention with multiple components acting in synergy to produce change.

Solutions

Westat’s evaluators conducted an evaluability assessment (EA) of the RPPN, incorporating perspectives of the grantees and funders and the RPPN’s goals and progress to inform an evaluation design for a future external evaluation.

For the EA, Westat obtained input from various interest holders, including HRSA and RPPN staff, representatives of external agencies, and families who provided their lived experience of their children with special needs or chronic conditions during pediatric emergencies. In addition, Westat developed a logic model in collaboration with the RPPN. The logic model served as an EA tool that conceptualized the complex structure and functions of the expanding RPPN. Westat identified the theory of action and theory of change that emerged from the logic model to inform an appropriate evaluation design.

Results

Results of the EA will inform HRSA’s decision on the external evaluation of the RPPN. The evaluation design:

• Addresses questions on the network’s implementation and drivers of change
• Is feasible and responsive to using existing, secondary data for analysis and collecting new data
• Will provide a more complete picture of the contributions of the RPPN and prioritize future outcomes