Planning and Evaluation Core

The Planning and Evaluation Core (PEC) will ensure that planning, monitoring, evaluation, and tracking of partnership activities will be comprehensive to the needs of the Meharry Medical College/Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center/Tennessee State University Cancer Partnership (MVTCP), and utilize evaluation activities to ensure that the MVTCP is successful in contributing to the broad goals of this NCI CPACHE program. The information we garner through our evaluation processes will be used to guide the investment of resources into projects, programs, and institutional-level strategies such as recruitment and leveraging of resources that support the goals of the Partnership. At a time in which differences in cancer outcomes across populations remain a major challenge to improving health and quality-of-life for all, ensuring that the efforts of the MVTCP are successful is paramount. Conducting high-quality, continuous evaluation of the MVTCP provides the opportunity to document our efforts, measure our successes, and attend to our weaknesses for the purposes of program improvement. During the past funding cycle, the PEC worked with all cores of the MVTCP to develop logic models that are used to identify program theory, as well as the measurable outputs and outcomes of each core. The metrics identified through this process were then harmonized with the CPACHE-wide evaluation indicators to create an integrated outcome framework designed to capture the broader impact of the MVTCP.