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Report

Mid-point evaluation of the UK Public Health Rapid Support Team (UK-PHRST) – Final Report

Itad has been contracted by UK-PHRST to conduct an external performance evaluation and independent monitoring (PE&IM) of the programme from inception in late 2016 until March 2021. The purpose of the evaluation is to ensure independent monitoring and quality assurance of programme delivery, documentation of lessons learnt, and robust tracking of results, providing assessment of the effectiveness of official development assistance (ODA) funds.

The evaluation has a learning focus and aims to support adaptive management. Hence the strong emphasis on utilisation and dissemination of insights. In line with the principle of utilisation-focused evaluation, developed by Michael Quinn Patton, which stipulates that an evaluation should be judged on its usefulness to its intended users, recommendations have been added to the report and its executive summary only after a process of co-creation. The rationale is that recommendations cocreated through a participatory multistakeholder consultation are more likely to be seen as relevant and feasible, and hence more likely to be followed through. Image credit: UK-PHRST Lab capacity building work at University of Sierra Leone College of Medicine and Health Sciences

This is the mid-point evaluation report. The report has been revised upon reception of feedback from UK-PHRST and following a co-creation of recommendations workshop that took place on 17th February 2020. An end-point evaluation report is due in early 2021. The report presents findings and conclusions from the three evaluation workstreams: Workstream 1 focusing on Design, Workstream 2 on Implementation and Workstream 3 on performance issues. This report is based on the data collection and analysis work carried out between June and December 2019, including one country visit to Sierra Leone, and over 100 key informant interviews conducted with UK-PHRST and its stakeholders including consortium partners, the UK Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) stakeholders, National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and other UK, international, regional and national stakeholders including the World Health Organization (WHO), Ministries of Health, Public Health Institutes and academic organisations.