Scenario One

The administration at Grandview Retirement and Nursing Facility strongly promotes ongoing education and training for all staff. In fact, when new personnel are hired, they agree to take two courses each year, selected from a long list of possible courses decided upon by administration and staff. Topics are many and diverse, from the law and patient rights to medication in geriatric care to the mindbody connection. Two of the recent training programs were devoted to answering these questions: (1) Is there a connection between mental and physical activity and sustained good health and longevity? (2) How do you encourage residents to stay both mentally and physically active? Program and nursing staff alike found the answer to the first question compelling: activity is indeed linked to well-being and longevity (Wells, 1997). They decided to institute additional programs for residents that would involve mental and physical activity. Coincidentally, a volunteer had been coming to the retirement and nursing facility for about six months to work with interested residents in an informal gardening program. The volunteer, Ruth, discovered that one of the things the residents missed most when they left their homes was their gardening. The activity helped them regain what they had enjoyed and gave them a real opportunity for mental and physical engagement. The facility had a limited budget, so Ruth made her own in-kind donations. From the beginning, however, the activity was extremely popular and she knew that available resources would not be sufficient to serve all the people who wanted to take part in the program. Ruth volunteered to look for funds, a grant that would allow Grandview to continue and enlarge the program. The administrators said they would be delighted if she would do the legwork, but of course they would need to know exactly what she was doing along the way so that they could keep their board of directors apprised. A short while later Ruth discovered that the Beed Foundation funded this kind of program and she got their grant application. One of the first items she saw on the application asked for an evaluation of the program. The items in the evaluation question included listing program objectives (for example, to increase residents' activity and mobility level) and listing measurements (both quantitative and qualitative) that would be used as indicators of achievement of those objectives. Ruth later learned that a quantitative measure might be the number of times residents took part in the gardening activities before the onset of the funded program compared to how many at the end of the program. A qualitative measure might be perceptions of garden activity staff regarding the focus and mood of residents. The grant also called for explaining data collection methods, a discussion of any sampling that would be done, a description of the evaluation design, the data analysis that would occur, the staffing, and the final report. Although she was puzzled about most of the items, Ruth hoped that subsequent meetings and discussions with the staff would answer her questions.

After reading chapter 1, reflect on Scenario 1 in your textbook. Describe what level of evaulation - efficiency, effectivenss or impact - do you think would be the most appropriate and why?