Last Updated: October 2023

Author: Comprehensive Cancer Control Program, Vermont Department of Health

The Vermont Department of Health Comprehensive Cancer Control (CCC) program works with Vermont’s statewide cancer coalition, Vermonters Taking Action Against Cancer (VTAAC) and other statewide partners to decrease the burden of cancer, Vermont’s leading cause of death. The 2025 Vermont Cancer Plan serves as a roadmap for this for statewide coordination, identifying goals, objectives and strategies to reduce the burden of cancer across the continuum of care.

To measure and improve the effectiveness of the VT CCC program, VTAAC and the Vermont Cancer Plan, the VT CCC program develops and implements evaluation activities intended to inform future program and coalition development. The VT CCC Program Evaluation Plan presents the five-year outline for evaluation activities which focus on the three components of the CCC program:

• Plan: the quality and implementation of the Vermont Cancer Plan.
• Partnership: the quality, contributions and impacts of VTAAC.
• Program: the extent to which interventions carried out by the CCC program executed and yield intended results.

Each year, the VT CCC program implements distinct evaluation activities to answer questions around program effectiveness. The proportion of evaluation actions completed each year provides a measure of how well the CCC program is assessing the effectiveness of efforts to reduce the burden of cancer in Vermont. 

The VTAAC Evaluation Oversight Committee developed the VT CCC Evaluation Plan and has a continued role in overseeing the implementation of the plan. The key stakeholders on the committee include the following:

• VTAAC Coordinator
• VT CCC Program Director
• VT CCC Data Analyst
• Vermont CCC Evaluation Contractor: Professional Data Analysts (PDA) A

More information can be found on the VTAAC website.

Evaluation is a key component of public health. Evaluation involves procedures that are useful, feasible, ethical, and accurate to improve and account for public health actions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the funding source for CCC activities, requires programs to develop and implement evaluation plans to assess and improve program performance. The Vermont CCC Evaluation Plan was developed using the CDC Comprehensive Cancer Control Branch Program Evaluation Toolkit’s framework for program evaluation.

The Vermont CCC program performs distinct evaluation activities each year to assess and improve program performance. In 2023 the program plans to conduct four activities to evaluate the program, with the goal of measuring, and subsequently improving, program effectiveness. 

The evaluation questions to be answered in 2023 include the following: 

• How much progress around Vermont Cancer Plan objectives is being made by VTAAC taskforces?  How well is the VTAAC Action Planning Tool being implemented by taskforces? 
• How active and satisfied are VTAAC members? How well do they represent the burden of cancer in Vermont?
• What is the capacity of cancer survivor psychosocial support in Vermont? What are the successes? What are the challenges?

The program plans to share the results of the evaluation activities in reports that will be presented to appropriate audiences. At the end of the calendar year the program plans to have implemented at least one recommendation that comes out of the evaluation activities.

More information, including evaluation activities and completion date details, can be found in the VT CCC Evaluation Plan.