NR 539 Week 5 Stakeholder Engagement Plan Example

Stakeholder Engagement Plan: Eight Groups Around Up and Steady Sorted by What Each Can Give or Withhold, None of Whom Reports to the Program Lead, With the Ask, the Offer and the Contact Schedule for Each

Student Name

College of Nursing, Chamberlain University

NR 539: Population Health II: Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Stakeholder Engagement Plan: Eight Groups Around Up and Steady Sorted by What Each Can Give or Withhold, None of Whom Reports to the Program Lead, With the Ask, the Offer and the Contact Schedule for Each

The Problem the Plan Addresses

Up and Steady, our county's two-year program of home visits and strength and balance classes for older adults after lift-assist falls, depends on people who do not report to me. I lead the program from the health department. The community paramedic works for the ambulance service. The class instructors work for the Area Agency on Aging. The primary care clinics that receive medication lists answer to their own practices. The churches that host classes answer to their congregations. Nobody on the engagement list is obliged to do what the program asks, which is what makes this document hard to write and necessary.

The plan therefore sorts stakeholders not by how important they seem but by what each can give the program or withhold from it. For each group it states what the program will ask, what the program can offer in return, how and how often the program will be in contact, and who on the program side owns the relationship. Guidance on community-engaged work emphasizes that partnerships last when each partner's interests and contributions are recognized and when communication is regular and two-way (Wallerstein et al., 2018).

The Stakeholders

Table 1 sorts eight groups by what they control.

Table 1

Stakeholder Engagement Plan

The Groups Most Likely to Withhold

Two groups hold the most power to make the program fail quietly. The first is the ambulance crews. If crews code lift-assist calls inconsistently, the paramedic will not know who to visit and the evaluation will lose its main data source. If crews do not mention the visit to patients, many will decline the paramedic's call. Crews have no stake in the program unless they see one. The plan therefore offers them something they value: fewer return calls to the same homes, reported back quarterly. Crews in our county know the addresses they visit repeatedly, and showing that those calls fall is the most persuasive thing the program can offer.

The second is primary care. The program sends a medication list and fall risk summary to each person's clinic. If clinics file the summary without reading it, a key part of the intervention disappears. Federal fall prevention guidance for health care providers was designed to make screening and intervention practical in busy clinics (Stevens & Phelan, 2013), and the program's summaries will use the same format that guidance recommends, so that clinicians recognize it. Each clinic will be visited at launch to agree what a useful summary looks like.

The Groups That Hold the Program's Future

County commissioners cannot affect the program during the grant but decide whether it continues afterward. The RE-AIM framework treats maintenance, whether a program is sustained beyond its initial funding, as one of five dimensions of public health impact (Glasgow et al., 1999). Commissioners will receive an annual briefing with the program's results and costs, beginning at the end of year one, not at the end of year two when funding is about to lapse. Engagement that begins when money is needed is too late.

Older Adults Themselves

Older adults and their families are both the program's beneficiaries and its gatekeepers: nothing happens unless they accept a visit or come to a class. The plan treats them as stakeholders to be asked, not only served. Three older adults who attended the listening session last year have agreed to join the steering group for its quarterly meetings, and the program card handed out by crews was drafted with their help. Their advice changed the card's first line from a statement about fall risk, which one reviewer said would make people feel old, to an offer of help making the home safer.

Monitoring Engagement

Engagement will be monitored with simple measures: the share of lift-assist records with a completed disposition field, the share of people who accept a visit, the share of medication summaries acknowledged by clinics and attendance at steering group meetings. If any measure falls, the owner of that relationship will contact the group within two weeks to find out why. The plan will be revised after six months, since some stakeholders will turn out to matter more or less than expected. Two are already under watch. The hospital's discharge planners may become a larger source of referrals than expected, which would add visits the paramedic's time does not yet cover. And the county's emergency management office, not on the list, may matter if winter storms again pull the paramedic back to emergency duty, as they did in a trial month last year. Adding a stakeholder is cheap; discovering one after a problem is not.

References

Glasgow, R. E., Vogt, T. M., & Boles, S. M. (1999). Evaluating the public health impact of health promotion interventions: The RE-AIM framework. American Journal of Public Health, 89(9), 1322-1327. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.89.9.1322

Stevens, J. A., & Phelan, E. A. (2013). Development of STEADI: A fall prevention resource for health care providers. Health Promotion Practice, 14(5), 706-714. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524839912463576

Wallerstein, N., Duran, B., Oetzel, J. G., & Minkler, M. (Eds.). (2018). Community-based participatory research for health: Advancing social and health equity (3rd ed.). Jossey-Bass.