Participatory Appraising
Appraising the level of participation of administrative personnel or the staff involved with processes in the consultation and education department at the Greenby Community Mental Health Center is one of the measures of evaluating processes. Considering that process evaluation is one type of evaluation, it precedes outcome evaluation. The type of outcome and its nature can be traced back to the number and nature of processes that were involved in the development of the project or the construct of services delivered.
For the Greenby Community Mental Health Center, the process involved in the consultation and education department includes the provision of education to caretakers in terms of how to manage the effects of mental instability of their patients or families. On the other hand, consultation involved the lookup of processes and procedures of approaching particular problems facing patients, caretakers, and the general public dealing with cases relevant to tasks addressed by mental health centers.
To evaluate the processes effectively, it is important to focus on the providers of services rather than the type of services offered. The consultation and education department is comprised of managers and employees who involve themselves more with the public than the managers do. In this case, the processes mentioned above can be monitored by appraising the performance levels of an individual employee or service provider for over 26 weeks.
Information to guarantee authentic data can be obtained from the service users upon which they are supplied with fliers in every consultation desk they visit. The fliers would require a service user to answer one or two questions regarding the effectiveness of the process and the process provider. The users will drop the fliers in a suggestion box or stand-alone mini office accessible by management and policymakers. To evaluate the processes, the performance of individual participating employees requires to be appraised to enable the synthesis of the processes by management.
Customer Satisfaction Analysis
As an outcome measure, the processes involved in the consultation and education department must be analyzed by their influence and control of the desired objectives and goals. In this case, the outcomes can be analyzed not only through the follow up of policy procedures, but also customer satisfaction. To evaluate the outcomes properly and effectively, the customer can be placed or considered the central focus of outcome evaluation (Lewis, Packard, and Lewis, 2007).
The consultation and education center has several objectives and two of these include: to provide sufficient and accountable service to customers through organized teamwork and informative systems; secondly, is to eliminate distraction from unnecessary processes that may mislead the whole team from achieving the ultimate goal of providing reliable, inexpensive, timely, and quality service to all.
As a measure to evaluate outcomes, changes made or modification of processes should only be implemented in certain phases that are not as productive as outlined by objectives. It is, therefore, important to implement the customer-satisfaction analysis outcome measure. This measure can be properly be effected by analyzing customer response, customer preferable of Greenby Mental Health Center, and retaining of customers. Through this measure, customer responses would determine whether the processes implemented are effective enough or not.
Scope and Purpose of Process and Outcome evaluation measures
The scope of the process evaluation measure, in this case, is 26 weeks upon which the participants of key interest include management and employees providing services. The purpose of this evaluation measure is to appraise the performance of individuals and their contribution to the department’s objectives. On the other hand, the outcome evaluation measure would involve the customers as the participants and would run for the same duration as the process evaluation. The influence of the process and outcome evaluation measures to my design is limiting the project to its core variables and eliminating irrelevance in focus.
Issues and Challenges Likely to arise in evaluating Greenby Community Mental Health Center
Evaluation of processes in Greenby Health Center is not a challenge and many variables can be altered by management to steer the department towards the right direction. However, challenges are likely to arise in the evaluation of outcomes. Some of the outcomes include biased customers who may not give honest feedback, ignorance by customers to participate, service users that may not be in a position to provide reliable information, mixed positive and negative views on the same variable of analysis (Patti, 2008).
Importance of Evaluation
Medical institutions are not very different in form as compared to business corporations. Both of these models serve the public as their customers. The similarity comes in on the issue of customer interests and trends. Despite the policies and methods of management employed in this situation, customer trends define the department’s position in delivering quality and reliable service. This evaluation helps the department director to assess readiness, team formation, level of empowerment, and the necessity of the policy amendment. If the director can trace holes in the design, full or trial strategies are applied to deal with the situation.
References
Lewis, J., Packard, T., and Lewis, M. (2007), Management of Human Service Programs, Belmont: Thomson.
Patti, R. (2008), The Handbook of Human Services Management, California: SAGE.