Evening Seminar and social, January 16, 2007, on
“Unique challenges to evaluating HIV/AIDS Programs
and Take-Home Lessons for the Evaluation Field”

Presented by: James Bell, President of James Bell Associates, Inc., Arlington, VA—a 35-person firm specializing in national health and human services program evaluation for 27 years. See details below.

The SFBAE and TEI have collaborated each year, beginning with 2001, to present evening programs to stimulate local evaluators and those who come from all over the world to TEI courses to come together to network and to learn more about new research or a new evaluation design or approach. We heartily invite you to join us in January 2007.

Date/time: January 16. Reception begins 6:00 p.m. (light food and cash bar) and presentations at 6:30-6:45.; end not later than 8 p.m.
Come between 5 and 6 p.m. for free wine social. Check in with TEI before.

Place: The Argonaut Hotel, 495 Jefferson Street, on Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco.

Fee: $25, includes light food and seminar.

How to register:

1. TEI students who have registered for January 2007 courses: Send e-mail with credit card information to tei@gwu.edu. OR call with same information to 302-644-0990.
Note: Purchase orders not accepted.

2. SFBAE members and others who are not attending day-time classes of the Institute: Go to www.sfbae.org to make payment by credit card.

Description of Evening Session

“Unique challenges to evaluating HIV/AIDS Programs and
Take-Home Lessons for the Evaluation Field

Presenter: James Bell, President, Bell Associates, Arlington, VA

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has brought about one of the most instructive transformations in the history of public health. For example, the introduction of antiretroviral therapy to treat those with the virus saved upwards to 3 million life years—more, by far, than any other treatment program in the history of medicine. About the only constant relative to this pandemic is that nothing is constant—all aspects of the problem have and are continually evolving—from the virus itself to the patients to the treatments to the methods needed to evaluate the treatment programs—a change in one part of the problem requires changes in the other part.

Evaluators have played a significant role in the quest to understand what works for whom and under what circumstances. They have been forced to keep pace to this ever changing set of circumstances and, in so doing, have gained knowledge that is universally valuable to the field of program evaluation. Some of the challenges of evaluating HIV/AIDS services programs—primary and secondary prevention, primary and acute care—include

• Enlisting the support of providers by negotiating well-articulated agreements in which providers obtain valuable information for clinical management decisions;
• Engaging and retaining subjects by offering tangible and intangible incentives for participation;
• Choosing state-of-the-art measures by staying abreast of ever-changing measurement options available in fast-paced HIV/AIDS domain; and,
• Demonstrating to providers and subjects the added value of evaluation through recommendations for lasting improvements in services.

These and other lessons from HIV/AIDS program evaluation will be presented and discussed in a seminar and group discussion.

James Bell is president of James Bell Associates, Inc., Arlington, VA—a 35-person firm specializing in national health and human services program evaluation for 27 years. He has 32 years of evaluation management experience on more than 100 projects sponsored by federal, state, and local government agencies and non-profit foundations; and is a 15-year veteran of HIV/AIDS program evaluation focusing on behavioral interventions for persons living with HIV/AIDS and co-occurring psychiatric and addiction disorders as well as severe socio-economic disadvantages such as unstable housing and social isolation. He led a ground-breaking $40 million multi-site cooperative research program in this area that was jointly funded by the National Institutes of Health and two other federal agencies. His experience spans an array of evaluation designs and programmatic areas, including: exploratory case studies of innovations in rural health care finance and delivery; design of a random assignment evaluation of a promising foster care prevention intervention; and, a nationally representative survey on protections for human research subjects. From 1974 to 1979, he worked with Joseph Wholey and other members of the Urban Institute's Program Evaluation Studies Group to develop logic models, evaluability assessment and other approaches to planning useful program evaluations.