Page 37 - Preventing Falls: How to Develop Community-based Fall Prevention Programs for Older Adults

Chapter 7. Evaluating Your Fall Prevention Program

CHAPTER 7

Evaluating Your Fall

Prevention Program

CDC’s Injury Center has developed recommended
approaches for evaluating injury prevention programs and
these can be adapted for fall prevention programs. This
chapter summarizes the key elements of these approaches.
More complete and detailed information can be found in
Demonstrating Your Program’s Worth: A Primer on Evaluation
for Programs to Prevent Unintentional Injury. (See selected
evaluation web resources at the end of this chapter.)

Introduction

Evaluation should begin while the program is in the earliest
development stages, not after the program is complete.
The earlier evaluation begins, the easier it is to collect the
data needed to showcase your program’s success. In fact, for
an injury prevention program to show success, evaluation
must be an integral part of its design and operation and
evaluation activities must be part of the program activities.

If a program is well designed and well run, evaluating the final
results will be a straightforward task of analyzing information
that was collected while the program was in operation. The
results can be extremely useful, not only to your own program,
but to other community partners, similar organizations, and
injury prevention programs.
The following sections will help clarify:

• Why evaluation is worth the resources and effort involved
• How to conduct an evaluation, and

• How to incorporate evaluation into fall prevention programs.

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