With support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and in partnership with the University of Washington (UW), The National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) provided funding and technical assistance to nine local health department (LHD) and community-based syringe services programs (SSPs) to support and strengthen monitoring and evaluation (M&E) efforts and systems with a funding opportunity entitled “Building Capacity for Harm Reduction Monitoring and Evaluation.”
Throughout the upcoming weeks, we’d like to highlight several of these sites and share successes and lessons learned from their M&E projects.
IDEA Exchange, affiliated with the University of Miami, is another site awardee that used NACCHO’s resources to strengthen their harm reduction monitoring and evaluation systems.
“The primary project that we completed under our NACCHO grant was expanding, implementing, and harmonizing a comprehensive data system for all syringe services programs in Florida,” explained an IDEA Exchange representative. They continued to explain that “with all programs collecting the same metrics on the same system, we are able to harness the power of data to improve implementation of services, monitor drug use trends and provide real-time, tailored, data-driven feedback and trainings to improve program implementation and enhance statewide collaborative reporting, grant writing, and advocacy.”
These grants were intended to improve existing harm reduction M&E infrastructure. IDEA Exchange explained that the harm reduction infrastructure in Florida is extremely underdeveloped due to “state policy that creates significant structural barriers to scaling-up these live saving services.”
“With the development of the IDEA SSP Statewide Data System, we are leveraging harmonized data to support the implementation and expansion of harm reduction across the entire state,” said IDEA Exchange. As a result of this project, the IDEA Exchange was able to support the launch of 4 new SSPs across the state, who are collectively serving thousands of people who use drugs, by equipping them with this comprehensive data system that would allow them to collect the data they need to inform their own work and to meet state and local regulations.
Every organization deals with its own trials and tribulations, and this project is no different.
When asked what specific lessons they had learned throughout the process, they responded “implementing a comprehensive, electronic-based data collection system can be daunting and high-barrier for many SSPs across the country. Through the work in this project, we have made data collection, analysis, and dissemination more meaningful, feasible, accessible, and community-driven using open-source data products that programs can access for free.”
IDEA Exchange encourages programs that are looking to implement or improve their data collection systems to utilize free resources and tools to assist their efforts.
Contact Kat Kelley ([email protected]) with any questions about this project. If your organization is interested in free technical assistance to support harm reduction M&E, visit the National Harm Reduction Technical Assistance Center, which offers free help to anyone in the country providing (or planning to provide) harm reduction services to their community.
