Who should take action?

• Directors of public health and public health teams
• Local authority, NHS and other local commissioners
• Providers of local authority or NHS commissioned services that have a direct or indirect impact on obesity

Actions

• All of the above should ensure sufficient resources are set aside for planning, monitoring and evaluation, and that all partners [ For the purpose of this guidance, a partner is a local department, service, organisation, network, community group or individual that could help prevent obesity.] and providers appreciate the importance of monitoring and evaluation.​

• All of the above should ensure all monitoring and evaluation considers the impact of strategies, policies and activities on inequalities in obesity and related health issues.

• All of the above should ensure all strategies, policies and activities that may impact on the obesity agenda (whether intended or not) are monitored in a proportionate manner.

• Monitoring arrangements should be built into all relevant contracts.

• All of the above should ensure sufficient resources are set aside to thoroughly evaluate new or innovative pieces of work (for example, 10% of project budgets).

• Local authority, NHS and other commissioners should ensure, when commissioning services, there is an appropriate lead-in time for baseline data collection, and data stratified so that the impact on inequalities can be considered.

• All of the above should use simple tests to assess value for money (such as resources saved by working in partnership).

• All of the above should encourage a reflective learning approach that builds on effective practice and changes or discards practices that are found to be less effective.

• All of the above should ensure monitoring arrangements address the information needs and expectations of a broad range of groups by:

• assessing a broad range of process indicators such as the views and experience of people who have participated in the obesity programme, feedback from partner organisations, programme referral rates and impact on community wellbeing

• ensuring the results of monitoring are fed back to teams delivering projects to improve implementation

• recognising the input of all organisations involved

• ensuring positive findings are used to motivate all those involved in the programme (for example, by capturing success stories in media campaigns).