Navigating times of change while building evaluation capacity in the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute

We described an evaluation uptake scale and demonstrated slow but steady increases in internalization and use of evaluative thinking by non-evaluation personnel (Curtis et al., 2023). We believe utility comes about when evaluative practice enables non-evaluative stakeholders not only to use evaluative products but to apply and initiate evaluative thinking and activity directed toward continuous quality improvement in their daily activity. Our most recent data show stakeholders beginning to do just that, but at the same time our Clinical and Translational Research funding renewal was awarded, the tracking and evaluation core experienced significant personnel change leading to dramatically different skill sets available to pursue new specific aims. We are now nine months into navigating collaborative revision of all core logic models in the context of new specific aims, how to address our own tracking and evaluation specific aims with a different personnel skill set, and how to continue our focus on building evaluation capacity among non-evaluative personnel. For this presentation, we draw on 10 years of evaluation data and experiences; collaborative logic models, which have and continue to evolve over time; evaluation reports and associated steering committee discussions; and interviews with key stakeholders focused on their evaluation needs and utilization of our evaluation recommendations. We focus on describing the challenges we are navigating in this time of change and our continuing efforts to both build evaluation capacity in non-evaluation personnel and to draw on the skill sets of those personnel to collaboratively facilitate tracking and evaluation specific aims.