NIHR SPHR Guidance on Systems Approaches to Local Public Health Evaluation. Part 1: Introducing systems thinking

In Part 1 of this two-part Guidance, we introduce you to systems thinking and consider how it can be applied to public health evaluation. Public health systems can include a wide array of people, organisations, structures and relationships relevant to a particular issue. This Guidance will prompt you to think about how your interventions and activities – and those of others – interact and influence each other to produce a wide range of impacts. Systems thinking encourages evaluators to step back and consider the bigger picture. Systems tend to change unpredictably over time. So, evaluators may need to change the form and focus of their evaluation as interventions evolve and unexpected developments occur. This adaptive approach to evaluation contrasts with more rigid evaluation approaches that focus on measurement of pre-specified ‘final outcomes’.