USER

As a newcomer to the world of interprofessional practice and education (IPE), I join an enthusiastic interdisciplinary team of people committed to promoting and studying IPE with the explicit intent of improving our health care system—no small task, but a critically important one. My role as lead evaluator for the National Center brings to bear over 30 years of evaluation experience in educational and social service settings.  First and foremost I am a pragmatic practitioner of evaluation, working to build people’s and organizations’ capacity to think evaluatively and to use data of many sorts as they determine next steps.

As an evaluator who spends a lot of time teaching, I constantly bridge the worlds of research and practice. Increasingly, my work concerns the role that people’s systematic use of data plays in effecting and documenting change, both of which will be critical as the National Center evolves. The ultimate goal of my work as it has evolved is to determine how to foster and support evaluation processes by whatever name in organizations over time. The terms I use to describe what I study have evolved, from action research and process evaluation, to participatory or collaborative evaluation (where evaluators work with program staff and participants), and finally to developmental evaluation and evaluation capacity building. I should also mention that over a decade ago I led the team that developed the Essential Competencies for Program Evaluators, the first formal set of competencies in our field and the basis now for formal credentialing in Canada. (The US currently has no credentialing process for program evaluators.)

To date I have learned a great deal by engaging with the many individuals and groups involved in the development of the National Center and look forward to expanding these collaborations. As I like to remind people, we are in this together, truly.