Designing an effective evaluation plan: a tool for understanding and planning evaluations for complex nursing contexts.

With the increasing emphasis on the development of nursing, evidence based practice, practice development and new and extended nursing roles, nurses are faced with the challenge of developing effective evaluation practices in an increasingly complex health care environment. This complexity has seen a number of evaluation methodologies and methods used in health care and nurses in clinical settings may find it difficult to know what approach or approaches best apply to their context. Given that evaluation of nursing innovations and interventions can have political, practical and fiscal consequences it is important that nurses have a broad understanding of evaluation, why it is important, the various types of evaluation methods and methodologies as well as some way of working through this complexity in order to develop evaluation plans and practices that best meet their needs. This paper explores a number of common types of evaluation methodologies and aims to assist nurses to better understand the 'why' and the 'how' of evaluation. In addition the paper describes the development of an evaluation tool which aims to assist nurses to develop effective evaluation plans that will best meet their evaluation needs.