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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Mark Pennington, Jo Gray, Professor Cam Donaldson, Dr Heather Dickinson
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Decision makers increasingly request evidence on the cost-effectiveness of social initiatives to inform roll-out and development. In practice, economic evaluation is rarely applied to social initiatives. Whilst the innate complexity of social initiatives generates challenges for economic evaluation, the difficulty is often compounded by the way in which initiatives are piloted. We examine the difficulties in undertaking economic evaluation of complex social initiatives using the recent evaluation of Budget-holding Lead Professionals, an initiative to enhance personalisation of services to children with additional needs, as a case study. We illustrate how the lack of a robust study design and the limitations of local data management structures hampered the evaluation and limited the resulting findings. We then highlight changes to the way in which complex social initiatives are piloted which would allow economic evaluation to play a greater role in their evaluation.
Author(s): Pennington M, Gray J, Donaldson C, Walker J, Dickinson H
Publication type: Article
Publication status: In Press
Journal: Social and Public Policy Review
Year: 2013
ISSN (print): 1752-704X
Publisher: University of Plymouth Press
