Process Evaluation: Its concept and application in Perinatal Care Project

Process Process evaluation is an essential component of any program evaluation or intervention research effort. It helps to assess whether an intervention works, why it works, and in what circumstances. It focuses on the processes involved in implementing an intervention and the essential features of an intervention's successes. In doing so it describes the process that might facilitate or prevent the success or failure of an intervention.
According to Saunders et al 2005 “Process evaluation is used to monitor and document program implementation and can aid in understanding the relationship between specific program elements and program outcomes.” Specifically process evaluation involves an assessment of “implementation, receipt and setting / context of an intervention and helps with the interpretation of outcome results” (Oakley et al. 2006, 2003).

Following the definition of Oakely et al. it is found that “Implementation” refers to how the intervention was implemented and whether it was delivered as intended, “Receipt” refers to how the intervention was received and “Context” refers to the Setting or context refers to the setting in which the intervention was delivered.

BADAS-Perinatal Care Project adopted the idea of process evaluation and introduced the approach to understand the essential features of Women’s Group intervention which has been running according to the concept of “community mobilization”. This is to aim that Process Evaluation will identify the essential features which are required for success of the intervention and at the same time the weaknesses that hindered to achieve the success as well.

Strategies selected by Women’s Group for implementation
1. Awareness raising
2. Emergency Fund
3. Transport
4. Effective communication with health care provider and
5. Motivate transport (van) owner/driver

By this period a total 39376 of the community people were made aware on maternal and neonatal health issues by the Women’s Group members where 4% were male. On the other hand Women’s Group members referred 5318 of the women at different stage of their pregnancy and delivery with the aim to ensure safe delivery as well.

Besides 65 of the Women’s Group are continuing their “Emergency Fund” out of 92 groups who decided to implement the strategy with the aim to meet health expenses during emergency period. Current savings of these 65 Women’s Groups are TK. 2, 09,906.00.

PE set up at a glance

PE requires both of qualitative and quantitative information to meet the purposes. Usually the Women’s Group meeting information and findings are being collected directly from the field either in every month or in every quarter by structured forms. The WG facilitators, WG Coordinators and finally the District Managers are involved with this process. On the other hand some other qualitative information regarding social context, organizational context etc. is being collected at different phase of Cycle 1 and Cycle 2 through “FGD” and “In Depth Interview” by the Process Evaluation Officer.