Professional Nurse Advocate Programme - Evaluation

The Authority required a supplier to undertake an evaluation of the impact of the Professional Nurse Advocates (PNA) programme on the PNAs and wider impact of PNAs in a team with recommendations for improvements.

We would expect the following stages to be included in this work:

1. Document the baseline before the PNA programme
2. Evaluate the PNA model
3. Assess the usefulness of using one or all elements of the model and the perceived impact and outcomes
4. Restorative clinical supervision - evaluation specifically of the perceived benefits.

The evaluation specification details four separate work-packages. These are stand-alone packages, which have been presented here as options to allow choices for the supplier, other delivery options can be incorporated into the tender document. The potential for linkages and interdependencies between these work-packages has been described but is not exhaustive.

We would expect the research commission to include interviews and focus groups with individuals to see if different fields of practice have different experiences, and if the programme works better in some settings than others.

The evaluation will be theory-driven throughout; all evaluation activities will incorporate elements to develop and refine a programme theory. This process will explicate the role of programme implementation activities and describe assumptions about how these are intended to achieve specific intermediate and distal outcomes. The importance of context in determining the extent to which these assumptions contribute to expected changes will be incorporated into this programme theory.