Reframing evaluation with Tom Ling

Episode 1: Evaluation Explained — In Conversation with Tom Ling

In the first episode of this series, IFIC Chief Executive Dr Niamh Lennox-Chhugani is joined by Tom Ling, Senior Research Leader and Head of Evaluation at RAND Europe, and former President of the European Evaluation Society.

Drawing on decades of experience leading complex evaluations, Tom reflects on why evaluating integrated care remains so challenging — and why so much evaluation struggles to meaningfully inform practice, policy, and improvement. The conversation explores how evaluation can move beyond technical proficiency towards approaches that are more useful, more engaging, and more closely connected to the realities of people delivering and receiving care.

They also discuss Tom’s recent article, Reframing the Evaluation of Integrated Care: Examples from the NHS in England, which you can read here:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/external_publications/EP71109.html

Key insights from Tom Ling

• On how evaluations are communicated

  “We produce almost astonishingly boring reports… some of them are unreadable. And even the executive summaries… are kind of 12 pages of really dense material.”

• On what integrated care actually is

  “It is treated in many evaluations as if it is a thing in the same sense that a new drug is a thing… That isn’t what integrated care is. It is an aspiration.”

• On the danger of single measures

  “Don’t get sucked into believing that one single measure is going to give you the perfect measure of integrated care. It will always be misleading.”

• On the gap between what’s measured and what matters

  “Very often what we’re asked to measure and what policymakers sometimes think they want to know isn’t the thing that matters most to patients, and indeed clinicians and carers.”

• On involving people on the front line

  “They’d given their energy, their time, their insights to the evaluators… and at the end of the process, the evaluators produced a study and a report which they couldn’t make sense of and didn’t describe their world. That has to be unacceptable.”

• On the need for a better mix of evaluation approaches

  “What we really need is a much longer scale study… instead of… the same evaluation questions… the same kind of time scale.”

• On embedding evaluative thinking in decision-making

  “That model is much more likely to create innovative insights and better thinking where you get evaluative thinking informing decisions.”