Hello. I’m Russell
Schutt, Director of the Women’s Health Network Project: Reviewing the Past,
Planning the Future. It is my great
pleasure to welcome you here this evening, to thank you for your willingness to
commit some of your time and expertise to this project—and to share my relief
that we planned this event for this evening and not yesterday evening.
I would first like to acknowledge the vision and leadership of
Mary Lou Woodford, Director of the Women’s Health Network. It was her vision that led to this project
and it is funds provided to her program by the Massachusetts Department of
Public Health that has made it possible to realize her vision. I would also like to acknowledge the support
of the Harvard Medical School, which has provided project facilities and which
supports so much of the work on which our project will draw, and the University
of Massachusetts, Boston, which facilitated my role in this project, and which
supports the Nursing and Health Sciences program and the Applied Sociology
program from which we have drawn staff and expertise.
The goals of our review and planning project are to evaluate
ten years of WHN program operations and to identify program modifications to
improve program quality, cost effectiveness and accessibility. Our goals will be achieved when we submit
recommendations in June that DPH can review and evaluate for feasibility.
We intend to succeed in this effort, because we all
recognize the importance of ensuring the best possible screening and followup
services for low income uninsured and underinsured women in
cervical cancer or cardiovascular disease.
And we intend to succeed in this effort because we feel so privileged to
be able to draw on the expertise of so many distinguished academic and program
leaders and clinicians.
Our project design reflects five principles for successful program
evaluation:
1) Plan
on the basis of empirical evidence.
Through reports on evaluations of the WHN program and reviews of research
literature, we will ensure that you have the evidence you need.
2) Use
multiple methods. Our evaluations of the
WHN have ranged from quantitative surveys of program clients to qualitative
interviews and focus groups with program staff.
These methods ensure that individual voices will not be lost in a sea of
numbers and that general patterns will not be overlooked in favor of
fascinating case vignettes.
3) Draw
on expertise in multiple disciplines and from practitioners and program leaders
as well as from academic experts. By
asking WHN program experts to collaborate with academic experts and health
professions leaders, by ensuring that clinical expertise is complemented by
business acumen and by medical and social science research, we seek to develop
recommendations that are both realistic and comprehensive.
4) Develop
a process, not just an event. We are not
here tonight for another conference just to hear the latest research or to gain
CE credits. As valuable as such events
are, our goal is to engage you in a collaborative
process that gives us all time to review new evidence and to evaluate each
others’ contributions.
5) Envision
the future. New medical techniques,
ongoing research on medical and social processes, changing information
technologies each require us to envision the future, as well as evaluate the
past.
Your program packet provides documents with more details
about our project. On the right side you
will find documents that are to be referred to tonight. On the left side are some documents that
provide some background about the WHN and the programs it offers.
Agenda Highlights.
It now gives me great pleasure to introduce Mary Lou
Woodford, Director of the WHN. Mary Lou
Woodford is a graduate of the University of Connecticut
School of Nursing. She is a certified case manager and a certified
clinical coder. She is also a graduate
student at the University of Massachusetts Isenberg School of
Management, where she is completing a Master’s degree in Business
Administration. She has worked in public
health for the past twelve years and has been the Director of the Women’s
Health Network since 1998. As attested
to by tonight’s Expert Panel meeting itself, Mary Lou Woodford is an
exceptional and visionary leader in the effort to improve women’s health in