Programme Evaluation and Quality Improvement Approaches in Older Adult Simulated Participant Methodology

Programme evaluation (PE) refers to the systematic use of social research methods to investigate the effects of a programme to provide evidence about the ‘value’ of a programme while also identifying recommendations for change and continuous improvement. PE takes place for many reasons, including examining the need for a programme, examining a programme’s theory and design, examining the programme’s underlying causal processes, assessing the programme’s impact, and determining cost efficiency. PE can take many forms, including small-scale evaluations conducted by the local simulation team or large-scale evaluations that may be more formal, engage external evaluators, and use multiple data sources. Irrespective of the scale, most PE is characterised by the creation of recommendations based on the interpretation of the data. As with research, PE involves several steps: gaining familiarity with the programme, determining goals, and choosing evaluation questions, methods, measures, analytic approaches, and dissemination. This chapter describes PE, why it is done, by whom, and how. We share activities readers can take to plan, design, and evaluate their contexts. Although this chapter focuses on PE more generally, we also discuss strategies for collaborating with older adult simulated participants (SP) and use examples from SP and other simulation programmes to illustrate PE approaches.