Cardiovascular disease risk factors among long-haul truck and train drivers in United States of America

For your selected context and health and wellbeing issue, you are asked to design an intervention. Prepare a program design document that contains the following:

• An introduction to the context, health and wellbeing issue, and determinants
• Describe the intervention(s) you are proposing and the reasons you are proposing those intervention(s). This should include the evidence for the effectiveness of your interventions for your target group, existing services that are in place, and other feasibility issues that are relevant to the context. It is not necessary to provide prioritisation matrices, even if you have used them, though it is expected that you justify the criteria/values that you used to select your intervention.
• Present and discuss a logic model to describe how your interventions may be expected to address the health and wellbeing issue.
• Within the three year timeframe for the program, you will need to conduct an outcome evaluation. With reference to your logic model, select:

      o The TWO outcomes in your logic diagram you would most likely measure in this 2 evaluation         

      o The TWO outcomes in your logic diagram you would least likely measure in this evaluation

      o and give justifications for your choice of each of these outcomes in (a) and (b)

• Describe your advocacy strategy for gaining funding and commitment for this intervention. In doing so, you will need to consider potential funders and partners.

Organisational context

You are the program design team leader for an organisation (please choose between a nongovernment or government organisation and make this clear in your report) with expertise in the context and issues described in your chosen scenario. It is assumed that a needs assessment has already been undertaken in this context, and that you have been asked to lead/facilitate the process of designing an appropriate intervention. If your program is approved, you will have access to up to AUD$1.5 million in funding over the next three years – you are not expected to budget; as with the group assignment this amount is only to give you an idea of the scale of the possible program. You may also make reasonable assumptions about being able to engage with local resources (government, NGO, community) and collaborate with local organisations. There is a possibility the funding may be continued after three years, but this is not certain. The design document you are preparing is for presentation to program experts in your health problem and context, who will decide whether your intervention should be funded. Writing a program design document This is not an academic essay but a report. A program design document is a common form of health communication that is primarily used as a technical document to brief stakeholders, and advocate for support and guide implementation. The language used is professional but may be less formal than academic writing and the report should be structured with headings and subheadings to guide the reader.

As with all academic writing, any ideas or work that is your own creation for this assignment does not need referencing, but other people’s work (or your own work for other subjects/projects) does need to be referenced if used. However you must avoid selecting a topic that you have covered in a previous assignment in this or other subjects and drawing upon this past material for this assessment task. General concepts like logic models, problem trees, stakeholder analysis frameworks etc. do not need to be referenced. Wherever possible, please refer to real-life sources on the context in which your program is set, but you are also allowed to make reasonable assumptions about the context where data are not available or specific to your region. Because you cannot carry out a real needs assessment we are allowing you to assume information that a real needs assessment would have provided. These assumptions could range from assuming the presence of certain services or organisations, to assuming you now the results of a particular aspect of a needs assessment. Please make it clear at what points you are making assumptions, and make sure your assumptions are reasonable.

What is Logic diagram?

The logic can be considered to be the model –in diagrammatical format

Basic components:

1. Inputs 2. Activities/Processes 3. Outcomes

INPUTS:

Those things that are necessary for the implementation of the program’s activities/processes. Without them, implementation will suffer and subsequently, lead to a less effective intervention.

• E.g. funding, stakeholder commitment, equipment, infrastructure, authorising body and policies, staff

ACTIVITIES:

The primary processes or actions that need to be done or implemented to achieve the program outcomes – or desired effects.

• Without the program activities there is no intervention.
• While inputs require some form of ‘activity’ to be undertaken (E.g. staff require training to be skilled) – these are not the defining activities of the intervention – they are necessary but they are not the actions that lead directly to the outcomes

OUTCOMES:

The purpose of an intervention is not to implement activities, but to generate change in one or more parameters of interest – we call these the outcomes. There are different terminologies used for depicting ‘outcomes’. I will describe these later. For now let’s try to get a better understanding of how these components of a logic diagram (inputs, processes and outcomes) are used to depict the model of how a program is ‘supposed to work’