Tackling obesity is amongst the most significant public health challenges in Wales, with around 25% of four- to five-year-olds and nearly 60% of adults currently either overweight or obese. To combat this challenge, the Welsh Government has developed the 10-year Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales (HWHW) strategy to reduce and prevent obesity in Wales.

We were commissioned by the Welsh Government to assess the evaluability of this strategy. We advised the Welsh Government on how they should approach the future evaluation of the strategy and how limited resources should be allocated to these evaluation activities. To support this, we actively engaged with Public Health Wales, the Welsh Government and other expert stakeholders in Wales, such as academics and Obesity Alliance Cymru.

Our work included assessing the feasibility of different evaluation methods in line with HM Treasury’s Magenta Book and Green Book, to develop a bespoke evaluation framework for the strategy. We then worked with stakeholders to produce a series of logic models and a Theory of Change to determine how HWHW and respective interventions will lead to the desired outcomes. This exercise was used to inform the evaluation approach and the identification of key indicators that can be used to evaluate the programme’s success. We developed a toolkit for determining which of the strategy’s policies should be evaluated and which evaluation type would be most appropriate, given constraints relating to data availability, relative and absolute cost, timeliness and robustness.

Our work will be used by the Welsh Government to determine the appropriate evaluation activities of the HWHW programme.

 ➥ Find our report here.