Healthy Living Unit

Evaluation

The Healthy Living Unit is required to evaluate all of its activities under the Strategy to ensure accountability to Parliament, stakeholders and Canadians. It does so by providing ongoing performance monitoring and evaluation measures for the unit’s key activities.

An Evaluation Workplan guides program performance management and allows for the ongoing assessment and refinement of the healthy living policies and programs. The Healthy Living Unit evaluates some of its activities by using the following tools:

• Project Evaluation Reporting Tool (PERT): recipients of Healthy Living Fund funding complete multiple questionnaires; and
• Effectiveness of Community Interventions Project (ECIP): a general theoretical framework which enables the assessment of the effectiveness of community-based interventions.

Other activities are assessed through regular, on-going formal evaluations.

The Healthy Living Unit’s four core components are expected to contribute to existing federal-provincial/territorial goals and targets. Within the short term, the expected results are the identification, enhancement and implementation of products and processes that will contribute to the achievement of the longer-term results.

The long-term expected results include:

• reduced health disparities for target population groups;
  
• healthier Canadians through the development of conditions that support physical activity and healthy eating, leading to healthy weights; and
  
• strengthened Canadian public health (promotion and prevention) capacity. Many of the Unit’s longer-term results and outputs will have had an impact on the systems, infrastructures and environments that promote healthy living in the long term.