Development and assessment of criteria to select projects for funding in the EU health programme

Abstract

Background: Projects are the main financing mechanism within the EU community action programme for public health. This article reports the process of establishing and validating evaluation criteria for projects submitted for funding within this programm to ensure that projects selected for funding conform with quality standards. Methods: An evaluation checklist was develope drawing on project management and health promotion literatur to Score 3 aspects of project quality: policy and contextual relevance (five criteri scores 0-8), technical quality (five criteri scored 0-6) and management quality (six criteri scored 0-5). Teams of three people made consensus ratings with the checklist on each of 215 eligible applications submitted in response to Calls for Proposals in 2007 and 151 submitted in 2008. Construct validit internal consistency and predictive validity were assessed on the grouped consensus ratings using psychometric test statistical methods. Results: Principal component analyses on both the 2007 and 2008 data gave a three component solutio which largely coincides with the dimensions of contextual relevanc technical quality and management quality. Reliability analyses show high Cronbach α's (>0.86) for each of the three scales. Discriminant analyses indicate that all three of the dimensions contributed to the decision to fund a project. Over the 2 year innovatio content specificatio EU added value and geographical coverage contributing most consistently to the success of an application. Conclusion: The study shows the successful development and validation of criteria to evaluate EU health project grant proposals. © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Public Health Association. All rights reserved.