Evaluation of the CAS/FIND workshops

The CAS/FIND workshops were implemented as part of the South Thames Research Application Programme (STRAP). The workshops were targeted to meet the training needs of research users, identified in a commissioned study. This had identified four related indicators of capacity to implement research in practice'. These independently derived indicators of capacity were adopted as the basic criteria for the evaluation of the CAS/FIND workshops. The methodology for this evaluation was initially considered within three separate sections. I) To examine the impact of the workshops by distributing questionnaires to the lead R&D officers (LRDOs) within each Trust. 2) To examine a sample of the participant evaluation forms over the 4 year period January 1997 to December 2000. 3) To evaluate the impact of the workshops by conducting a survey involving the last 250 participants. I have considered the validitY of this process at two levels. First at a strategic level, questioning whether this methodology has the capacitY to identify the key arbiters of qualitY .Second at a more detailed level, examining the validitY of the sampling procedure and questionnaire.