Summer Student Working at Health Sector Organization

Summer Student Working at Health Sector Organization

Student developed an evaluation framework and planning for health organization with a focus on digital health.

Work-integrated learning can help build organizational capacity and culture of evaluation. When I began working at my current company - a health sector organization with a focus on digital health - evaluations were done ad hoc and occasionally contracted out. I had a research background and some evaluation experience so I wanted to initiate a centralized evaluation service to help us understand the impact of our work. In the absence of a dedicated budget line, we began by establishing a framework and then found opportunities to assign summer students to work in the area, and eventually were able to recruit a graduate student from a health evaluation program. For us, the benefit was significant: we were exposed to specialized tools and methods that were directly applicable to our sector and in some cases, more robust than what we had used. She was also effective at helping others in the organization develop an appetite for the kind of insight that evaluation can lend to help improve our work. In turn, she established more experience in workshopping evaluation planning and executing an entire evaluation from beginning to end, which helped her move to an excellent full-time position elsewhere.