Att 7e - Script for Preparatory Call

Phone Script for Site Visit Preparatory Call

Good morning/afternoon __________,

This is ______ from the RTI CPPW Case Study team. I am calling to talk with you about your community’s involvement in the CPPW Case Study evaluation.

Is now still a good time to talk?

No - No problem. When would be a good time for us to re-schedule?

Yes (then continue)

I wanted to spend a few minutes talking with you about the CPPW case study evaluation and answer any questions you may have about your community’s involvement. Would that be okay?

Overview of Case Study Evaluation and Community Involvement

As you already know, the long-range intent of the CPPW effort is to drive risk behavior changes related to chronic disease outcomes. However, because the funding period for CPPW/ACA is only 24 months, little change in these outcomes is expected within the funded period. This is one reason why CDC decided to conduct a case study of a subset of CPPW/ACA sites. This part of the evaluation will focus on the effectiveness of implementation of the MAPPS strategies and the degree to which these have resulted in the desired policy, systems, and environmental changes. It will also focus on how your community/state has implemented its strategies, challenges you have faced, things that have perhaps made it easier or facilitated implementation, and lessons learned along the way.

You are one of 15 CPPW Communities, six CPPW states and three ACA states involved in the case study, so your participation is very important to us. What is learned from the case study will be shared with other organizations, communities and states who are also looking to implement policy, systems and environmental change in the areas of tobacco and obesity.

As mentioned in the letter you received, we will be conducting two site visits to your community/state to speak with program staff and partners about your activities and experiences. RTI is the contractor for the case study evaluation, so it will be RTI staff who will conduct these visits, not CDC staff. Each site visit will last approximately 3-4 days, during which we hope to speak with up to 20 of your program staff and partners. These partners are unique to each site but may include: local and state health departments and other governmental agencies, health centers, schools, businesses, community and faith-based organizations, academic institutions, health care, local and/or state legislators and other community partners. We will work with you in the next weeks and months to identify the most appropriate individuals for us to speak with during our visit.

We will also work with you to identify a 3-4 day period that will work well with your schedule and the schedules of your partners so that we can make these visits as minimally burdensome as possible. We anticipate that the interviews with program staff will last approximately 1.5 - 2 hours each and that the interviews with programs partners will last 30 minutes to one hour. However we also understand how difficult it is to get a significant amount of time from key partners, such as healthcare representatives and legislators, so we are flexible to working with their schedules and available time.

Each interview will be conducted by at least one interviewer and one recorder. We will also ask permission to audio-record the interviews so that we can ensure that our notes are thorough and complete for analysis. To protect privacy, individual identifiers will be removed from the notes, and no identifiers will included in the case study summaries and reports to be developed. The audio recordings will be destroyed once the notes are complete.

A second site visit will be conducted at the end of your funding period so that we can get a full picture of progress made, and lessons learned during the ‘lifetime’ of the effort. We may want to speak with some of the same people during the first and second visit so during the first visit, we will ask their permission to contact them again if it is appropriate for the project.

At the completion of each visit, members of the RTI team will develop a case summary for your site. This will be a relatively brief summary of your efforts and you will have an opportunity to review the summary and provide comments before it is finalized.

Twelve sites will be selected for the development of enhanced case study reports. We won’t know who these sites are until after the first site visits, but for those selected a slightly longer and more detailed report will be developed. These reports will be designed for the practitioner, so that other organizations, communities and states who are interested in doing policy, system and environmental change can adapt the approaches used to their own environments and learn from your experiences. Each of the 10 sites selected for the enhanced case study reports will again have the opportunity to review these reports and provide comments before they are finalized.

That is a quick overview of what the case studies will involve. I would be happy to answer any questions you have?

(Allow time for questions)

Next Steps

What I would like to do next is send you some information to help you begin to think about who in your CPPW effort we should talk with and when would be a good time to schedule our visit. I would like to send you an Interview Planning Tool, which explains the possible ‘categories’ of individuals we are interested in interviewing. Please feel free to work with your staff and/or Leadership Team to help fill in this table. If you have any questions about whom to include, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Another next step will be determining the best days for our visit and scheduling the individuals you would like us to speak with. I am also attaching a sample scheduling worksheet so that as you begin to talk your partners, you can start to develop a schedule for the site visit. As you saw when we scheduled this call, our team is using an on-line scheduling system called Doodle. This may also be a helpful tool as the site visit schedule is developed, so if you would like any assistance with the use of this resource, please let us know.

Once you have developed the list of individuals you would like us to speak with, please send it to us and we can review it together to ensure that we have the right mix of individuals involved in the case study interviews.

Please also let us know some dates that will work for you and your partners so we can get the site visit dates on our schedule. We would like to have this date within the next 3 weeks if possible.

Do you have any other questions for us at this time?

Thank you for your time. Please do not hesitate to call or e-mail me if you have any questions. We are looking forward to speaking with you and your partners about your CPPW effort.

References:

Interview Planning Tool

Worksheet for Scheduling Site Visit Interviews

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