This report is an external evaluation of the Care & Culture
healthcare education project in the municipality of Huddinge,
Sweden. It’s central focus is the Mentor program. In this program
healthcare staff from local care centres for elderly and disabled
populations have taken part in education and training efforts with
the goal of becoming mentors for high school students interested
in pursuing work related to these populations. The Care & Culture
project and its programs understand culture to be essential to the
delivery of quality healthcare. Culture here incorporates both an
ethnic approach to the term, embracing a society whose citizens
have a diversity of cultural backgrounds, as well as an action
approach emphasizing the need to use the arts and creative
expression in the process of wellbeing and for improving life
quality.
The external evaluaton team from Uppsala University, working
through an international network on evaluation research, has
followed the Care & Culture Mentor program from its design
through its completion. The evaluation design has needed to
fi nd a way to mark and measure the program’s development
and outcome in relation to its pioneering double competency
development goals: competency in the mentoring process and
competency in cultural understanding and implementation.
In order to do this, the evaluation’s design has relied upon a
multi-level, multi-population, and multi-method process of data
gathering and data analysis over time. A specially constructed
action research process, allowing for strategic feedback to be
given during the evaluation process, has been used
2004.