Theme: Models of Care Year: 2022
Background: The Eliminate C Australia (ECA) partnership funded community organisations to
implement innovative hepatitis C virus (HCV) programs in priority settings. High-quality evidence
demonstrating the effectiveness of community-based HCV programs on testing and treatment
uptake is needed, but often stymied by limited monitoring and evaluation capacity within
organisations. We outline strategies to support community organisations to evaluate their models of
care and contribute to the evidence base for HCV elimination.
Methods: The ECA partnership provided funding to 12 community organisations across Australia to
implement HCV models of care, and supported them to monitor and evaluate these programs.
Through this partnership, ECA embedded staff, shared resources, and worked collaboratively with
organisations to developed tailored program logics and evaluation plans, which were reviewed and
refined over the life-cycle of programs. Technical support was available at no-cost, and included
evaluation theory and skills training, support with formal reporting, dissemination of evidence, and
the development of funding applications.
Outcome/Results: Between 2019–2022, ECA has provided $2m in funding to 12 community-based
programs across five Australian jurisdictions. Funded models of care included workforce
development, nurse outreach, peer support and incentive programs. Organisations were
enthusiastic about applying robust monitoring and evaluation strategies, and remained highly
engaged throughout the implementation of their models of care. All 12 programs successfully
implemented and reported against their program logic and evaluation frameworks. Organisations
reported sustained improvements in their organisational monitoring and evaluation capacity.
Conclusions/Applications: We demonstrated that research organisations can support community
organisations to develop and implement high-quality monitoring and evaluation frameworks. With a
collaborative approach, ECA strengthened the monitoring and evaluation capacity within community
organisations, embedding processes to generate high-quality evidence of program effectiveness.
Future large-scale HCV elimination programs which fund community organisations should employ a
collaborative, partnership approach to building evaluation capacity to ensure robust evidence is
generated.
Disclosure of Interest Statement: AW’s institute has received speakers’ honoraria from AbbVie for
activities unrelated to this work. JSD’s institution has received consulting fees from Gilead Sciences,
AbbVie and Merck. JSD’s institution receives investigator-initiated research funding from Gilead
Sciences, AbbVie, Merck and Bristol Myers Squibb. MH is the recipient of a NHMRC Investigator
Grant and has received investigator-initiated research funding from Gilead Sciences and AbbVie. MS
is the recipient of a NHMRC Senior Research Fellowship (Commonwealth Government) and has
received investigator-initiated research funding from Gilead Sciences and AbbVie and consultant
fees from Gilead Sciences for activities unrelated to this work.