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. 2024 Apr 25;8(1):e79.
doi: 10.1017/cts.2024.526. eCollection 2024.

A landscape assessment of CTSA evaluators and their work in the CTSA consortium, 2021 survey findings

Verónica Hoyo  1 , Eric Nehl  2 , Ann Dozier  3 , Jillian Harvey  4 , Cathleen Kane  5 , Anna Perry  6 , Elias Samuels  7 , Susanne Schmidt  8 , Joe Hunt  9
Affiliations

A landscape assessment of CTSA evaluators and their work in the CTSA consortium, 2021 survey findings

Verónica Hoyo et al. J Clin Transl Sci. .

Abstract

This article presents a landscape assessment of the findings from the 2021 Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Evaluators Survey. This survey was the most recent iteration of a well established, national, peer-led systematic snapshot of the CTSA evaluators, their skillsets, listed evaluation resources, preferred methods, and identified best practices. Three questions guided our study: who are the CTSA evaluators, what competencies do they share and how is their work used within hubs. We describe our survey process (logistics of development, deployment, and differences in historical context with prior instruments); and present its main findings. We provide specific recommendations for evaluation practice in two main categories (National vs Group-level) including, among others, the need for a national, strategic plan for evaluation as well as enhanced mentoring and training of the next generation of evaluators. Although based on the challenges and opportunities currently within the CTSA Consortium, takeaways from this study constitute important lessons with potential for application in other large evaluation consortia. To our knowledge, this is the first time 2021 survey findings are disseminated widely, to increase transparency of the CTSA evaluators' work and to motivate conversations within hub and beyond, as to how best to leverage existent evaluative capacity.

Keywords: CTSA; Continuous improvement; NCATS; evaluation; survey; translational science.

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Conflict of interest statement

None.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Evaluation team members 2018 and 2021. The mean number of full-time equivalent (FTE) among survey respondents was 1.57 FTE.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Evaluation contribution of performance improvement decisions 2018 and 2021.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Evaluation contribution to resource allocation decisions 2018 and 2021.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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