Nurse-led projects for people experiencing homelessness and other inclusion health groups: a realist evaluation

In an area as complex as healthcare, it may seem a daunting task for an individual practitioner to make a difference in terms of improving healthcare services. Nevertheless, some organisations make small grants available to enable practitioners to experiment with or pilot ideas for service innovations and improvements. The hope with these will be that, if successful, the innovation will be adopted by mainstream services, either locally or further afield. However, such a result is dependent on a whole range of factors, varying from the willingness of the individual's employing organisation to welcome innovation to whether a project leader can find influential champions to advocate for the project's adoption.

To maximise the chances of wider adoption, it is essential that projects can demonstrate successful outcomes, which requires projects to be evaluated. The Health Foundation (2015) suggests that evaluation is concerned with:

‘… practical assessment of the implementation and impact of an intervention. It is conducted in a spirit of discovery, rather than management or monitoring. It is concerned with developing understanding and supporting more strategic judgement and decision-making, such as whether and how an intervention should continue, and continue to be funded.’