Delivering evidence based practice in Victoria's Family Services

The Victorian Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) understands the importance of providing evidence-based programs to enhance results for the community, and has been working closely with CEI on several projects designed to improve the welfare of Victorian families.

CEI has previously worked with DHHS to build a menu of evidence-based programs across various family welfare areas. DHHS has funded a number of different non-government organisations to implement these programs.

Building on this earlier work, CEI has also now been engaged to carry out a range of evaluation work to ensure that the programs being funded are being implemented as intended and have the best chance of delivering positive results for the community.

CEI is doing this through:

• undertaking an implementation evaluation of the programs across several sites, to examine how the programs are being delivered
• designing an outcomes and economic evaluation to enable DHHS to understand what works in order to make informed and robust future decisions about the programs

CEI’s work - from making sense of the evidence and building the menu, to following through with developing the evaluation methodology - is helping shape the future of evidence-based programs and projects in Victoria.