Featured Resource: Program Sustainability Assessment Tool | PSAT [sustaintool.org]
By Dr. Jonathan A. Caballero, Implementation Support Consultant
4-min read
It’s important to think early and often about the sustainability of your implementation initiative. While discussing it can sometimes lead to emotional reactions, it also can kickstart conversations that evolve into planning and concrete actions to maximize the probability of successfully sustaining the work you are doing.
Using a sustainability tool can facilitate the process of understanding and assessing key factors that are known to play a major role in the sustainability of change initiatives, programs, and innovations. An additional benefit is that the clarity achieved about factors influencing sustainability can help you and your team make those conversations easier. After all, a good understanding is fundamental for planning and executing a sustainability strategy.
One of the most used sustainability planning tools is the “Program Sustainability Assessment Tool” (PSAT). Let’s take a look together at what it offers, shall we?
The PSAT
The Program Sustainability Assessment Tool was developed by the Center for Public Health System Science, through a rigorous process including literature reviews, psychometric assessments, and the evaluation of its reliability and adequacy for the evaluation of more than 250 programs. As of April 2023, it is officially in version 2, after a language revision to make it more applicable in a variety of contexts.
Its website – sustaintool.org – is organized into 4 main sections: “Understand”, “Assess”, “Plan”, and “Resources”, which we describe below.
Understand sustainability
This section offers a concise and accessible introduction to the factors that influence sustainability. This can be useful to introduce your team to the idea of the need of considering multiple domains when thinking about sustainability. Quite often, people taking part in change initiatives think mainly about funding stability when the idea of sustainability is raised. There is no doubt it is important, but many other factors, such as partnerships, communication, and strategic planning also play a substantial role in sustaining a program. For each of the 8 sustainability factors, the website provides a definition, a rationale of why the factor matters, and links to resources and potential action steps related to the factor.
Assess sustainability
This section provides access to a web version of the PSAT that can be completed as an individual or as a team. For individuals, it suffices to create an account and complete the tool online (~15 minutes), after which you can download a pdf report that you can use for planning the next steps.
For team-based assessments, the free version allows inviting up to 12 people to complete the tool independently. Each of them receives a private report with their results and the person coordinating the assessment receives an aggregated report without individual data.
Plan for sustainability
This section delineates a few suggested steps to develop a sustainability action plan. To help you, it offers example plans and downloadable templates.
Resources
This section offers a list of external resources – organized by each of their 8 sustainability domains – to help you understand and plan how to address or improve each of these domains.
What’s next?
We invite you to explore and complete the PSAT, it can take as little as 15 minutes!
And if you are craving more information on the topic, you may want to check other resources that TCI has previously covered, or our brand-new Context Compass Framework, which can help you understand contextual factors as you move towards the sustainability of your change initiative.
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