Background: The AHEAD consortium project, initiated in April 2021, aims to address the challenge of ‘medical deserts’ in Europe—areas underserved by healthcare professionals—by improving access to health services and ensuring equitable access to skilled health workers in Italy, Moldova, the Netherlands, Romania, and Serbia.

Our role: Q3 undertook a mid-term and end-term evaluation of the AHEAD project to assess the progress of the consortium’s work towards achieving the project’s objectives. The objectives were:

1. Generate evidence and build stakeholder knowledge on medical deserts through its advocacy work
2. Develop and build consensus on context-specific, feasible policy measures to support policy makers to counteract and prevent medical deserts;
3.  Ensure joint reflection on effective, feasible and acceptable advocacy and policy measures to prevent and counteract medical deserts, among national and global key stakeholders.

The mid-evaluation also aimed at assessing the consortium’s ways of working to improve management and coordination.  

Our Approach: As part of the two evaluations, we engaged with a wide range of stakeholders at both national, EU and project levels to develop the evaluation plan (including key evaluation questions, key indicators, metrics, data sources and data collection methodology). We undertook over 100 interviews in English and local languages, 5 FGDs and reached out to 85 additional stakeholders through an online survey. Results from consultations were analysed, synthesised and reported following our action-oriented framework. 

Outcome: During the mid-term and end-term evaluations, stakeholders from all partner organisations were engaged and consulted. Data collected from the KIIs was transcribed verbatim and an interpretive thematic analysis method was to analyse the data. Based on the evaluation key findings, the study team proposed a total of 10 recommendations which were ratified during a reflective workshop with the consortium members.