Integrating Evaluation in Program Design for Sustainable Academic-Public Health Partnerships: the Rollins Epidemiology Fellowship Program

The Rollins Epidemiology Fellowship Program aims to enhance Georgia’s state and local public health programs by training early-career epidemiologists to passionately serve their communities through critical surveillance, outbreak response and general public health practice. This is a 2-year intensive training program with on-the-job experience and supplemental professional development and mentorship programming. During the fellowship, daily activities are dictated by LHD site supervisors, such as engaging in COVID-19 and notifiable disease case investigation and contract tracing, outbreak investigations, developing and maintaining district epidemiology reports, and community-focused vaccine promotion programs. To supplement these experiences, RSPH provides a competency-based professional development curriculum, supplemental mentorship, and comradery-building programming. This presentation will share process, outcome, and impact evaluation metrics for the first cohorts of the fellowship program as the public health narrative shifted from the COVID-19 emergency to “return to normal.” These results have altered the story of the fellowship in order to be responsive and adaptive to the diverse needs and cultures of public health departments across Georgia. As the director of the fellowship program who operationalizes program development, management, and evaluation processes, this presenter will emphasize the importance of integrating continuous program evaluation into program design and implementation. This presenter will also share stories on how program evaluation can be used as a tool to sustain mutually beneficial, successful partnerships.