Monitoring your CRCS activities and your clients’ challenges and progress will provide the information you need to improve your work against the epidemic. Evaluating your activities against some standard – for example, the goals your agency has for recruitment, the risk characteristics of the population you intend to recruit, you and your clients set for their risk reduction – will help you determine if and where you need to change course in your program.

Often program monitoring is done informally, as you and your supervisors keep up with activities and aspects of your programs that need to be developed or changed in order to meet your clients’ needs. But a systematic approach to monitoring will assure that your agency captures important information on a regular basis. For example, you should regularly determine whether measurable objectives are being accomplished, and why or why not. Regular monitoring also assures that the information is accessible to persons who need to see it, whenever they need to do so.

Monitoring your clients’ progress systematically will also provide you with the information you need for evaluation. That is, you will be able to see the trends in your clients’ progress to determine if your work is succeeding and where you may need to make adjustments.

This manual provides templates (Appendices A-J) that your agency can modify to assist your monitoring and evaluation data collection. Additionally, we have included PEMS-related information on the templates, identified with the symbol ® for required data or * for optional reporting in PEMS. CDC does not require that you use these templates for CRCS monitoring and evaluation or for reporting to PEMS, although the data on the templates indicated by ® are required for PEMS reporting.

We have included a CRCS- PEMS crosswalk list in Appendix Y.

Also, case notes – the regularly updated files you keep on your clients – can be an important source of monitoring and evaluation data. Often you will be able to use case notes to add information to data collection forms, such as risk-related information. Ultimately, this information can also be used for PEMS reporting. Also, systematic reviews of case notes can reveal strengths and weaknesses in the CRCS process.

Keep in mind that you need more data to monitor your program and for quality assurance than CDC will require for PEMS reporting. The best way to think about reporting to CDC is that you will likely only report to CDC a subset of the data you collect daily if you have a well-developed monitoring and evaluation system. You just have to know what data CDC requires – the ^® will help you with that question.

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