Hello Evaluator/Epidemiologist Colleagues,
“Planning a community is more a matter of finding the triggers to catalyze evolution than creating a full design.” (https://www.cdc.gov/phcommunities/resourcekit/launch/plan.html).
Our aim is to channel a structured, open platform to trigger these discussions that would help us support each other and share valuable notes in areas that we may be struggling with, or questions that we may have along the way.
This is a unique group of epidemiologists, evaluators, and other individuals working on different aspects of OD2A surveillance and prevention activities. Since all of us came together through this community of practice, we saw a great opportunity to create effective workgroups that include all interested states/individuals. Most respondents from the last webinar indicated that they have dedicated evaluators for surveillance and prevention activities who spend 80-100% of their time on OD2A related things.
From the responses we received, we learned that everyone has a few hours each month to collaborate, but that the individuals in this group work on different combinations of strategies. Traditionally, workgroups have a consistent goal and members, however that format would not fit the group we have here. We will be creating a modular workgroup schedule, with groups of 4-5 who meet a finite number of times and work on a specific task as having a clear purpose with measurable goals and timeline is key for a successful workgroup. 4-5 people in a workgroup was selected as the perfect balance between the two rules of thumb: “none of us is as good as all of us” and “too many cooks spoil the broth.”
We will begin with one workgroup topic that will meet once/month during quarter 4 of 2020. That workgroup will dissolve at the end of 2020, with another starting in 2021 and dissolving after the end of quarter 1 2021, etc. We hope to further build these sessions on the lessons learned and feedback received from the initial workgroups.
The first topic or workgroup task will be to pool DOSE submission metadata from individuals working on evaluating strategies 1 and 2. This group will create a master sheet with DOSE submission metadata in order to compare metadata across states for evaluation purposes. The group will meet once in early November and once in early December, an email will be sent out to individuals working on the evaluation of strategies 1 and 2 after this post. Certainly, anyone is welcome, so please shoot us an email if you missed the last webinar and are interested!
We are working on making a shared drive available for the community to share resources like toolkits and online dashboards, in addition to our states’ logic models and evaluation plans. The expectation from this collaboration is to help each other with OD2A needs by discussing best practices and strategies and creating breakthrough ideas and new practices. This is an open space intended to support each one of us and we would love to hear from you if you have any suggestions or would like to discuss a concern with the community and receive feedback. Please email us at [email protected] and [email protected].
We are excited to work with all of you!!
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