Introduction

Lesson 1 introduced the environmental scan as a close relative of the review that studies current programs and services through documents, websites, surveys and interviews. In Lesson 2 the Cedar Valley team wrote a scan question beside its review question, and Lessons 5 and 7 noted that many grey-literature documents describe community programs in detail with little or no evaluation, which makes them useful to a scan even when a review cannot include them as studies. This lesson teaches scan methods in full.

Section 1 defines the scan and describes its origins and uses. Section 2 covers four methods: document and website review, program inventories, surveys of organizations and key informant interviews. Section 3 covers the sampling of organizations and jurisdictions and the charting template, and Section 4 shows how to combine a scan with a literature review and how to report it.

1.1 What an Environmental Scan Is

An environmental scan collects and interprets information about current programs, services, policies, organizations and trends in a defined setting, so that an organization can plan. In this phrase the environment is the organizational setting around the people who are planning. For a health authority, that setting includes community organizations, municipal and provincial governments, funders, professional groups and the residents it serves.

Published definitions vary. Following a protocol published in BMJ Open (Charlton et al., 2019), Charlton and colleagues (2021) reviewed 96 studies that used environmental scans in health services delivery research and reported that the field lacks a standard definition and uses its terms inconsistently. Their thematic analysis of how these studies defined or described scans produced several themes, including the four shown in the cards below, and the authors proposed a working definition for health services delivery. In a later survey of 47 people, mostly in Canada, who had conducted or used scans, Charlton and colleagues (2024) found that respondents often described a scan as a snapshot of a defined setting and found scans hard to distinguish from needs assessments.

Select each card to read what the theme means and how it applies to the Cedar Valley scan.

Taken together, these descriptions point to five features of a well-designed scan: it covers a defined setting at a stated time, it serves a stated decision, it draws on several kinds of sources, it follows a documented procedure that someone else could repeat, and it produces a structured account of what exists.

1.2 Origins in Organizational Planning

Environmental scanning began in business. In his 1967 book Scanning the Business Environment, Francis Aguilar described scanning as the acquisition of information about events and relationships outside a company that would help its senior managers plan the company's future course of action. Aguilar distinguished four modes of scanning, which differ in how purposeful and structured the search for information is. Chun Wei Choo (2001) later linked these modes to research on information seeking and organizational learning, and argued that organizations use all four, moving from broad viewing to formal search as their questions become specific.

An environmental scan as this course teaches it is a formal search in Aguilar's sense. The other three modes still matter, because they often prompt a scan and supply leads that the formal search then checks.

Scanning became part of strategic planning, where its results feed tools such as a SWOT analysis, which sets an organization's internal strengths and weaknesses beside the external opportunities and threats it faces. Many scans also group external information under political, economic, social and technological headings (PEST). Graham, Evitts and Thomas-MacLean (2008) note that scanning spread from business to the non-profit sector, where the United Way of America used comprehensive scanning in the early 1980s, and that health researchers have since used scans in areas such as mental health, nutrition, women's health, Indigenous health, housing and knowledge transfer. The timeline below shows the publications this lesson draws on.

1.3 Uses in Health Services and Public Health

Charlton and colleagues (2021) found that health services researchers conducted scans for many purposes, of which the most common was to examine the current state of programs, services or policies. Scans informed recommendations in 20 percent of the 96 studies they reviewed. Health organizations use scans to plan new programs, compare policies across provinces or countries, map the services available to a population, find gaps and partners, and prepare for a needs assessment or an evaluation.

Wilburn, Vanderpool and Knight (2016) described a scan for a statewide project on human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination in Kentucky. Their scan combined interviews, a survey of health care providers, reviews of the literature and policy, a scan of television coverage and registry data. From that experience they proposed a seven-step process, which the table below sets beside the Cedar Valley scan.

In Canada, CADTH, now Canada's Drug Agency, has published environmental scans as one of its report types. Its 2015 process document describes scans of health care practices, processes and protocols inside and outside Canada, based on a limited literature search, a survey of Canadian health care decision-makers, or both. These scans give a snapshot of current practice and do not make recommendations for or against a technology (CADTH, 2015).

1.4 Passive and Active Scanning, and the Sources a Scan Uses

Graham, Evitts and Thomas-MacLean (2008) distinguish two modes of scanning. Passive scanning collects knowledge that already exists, such as published literature, reports and information from established contacts. Active scanning creates new knowledge with data collection tools such as surveys and interviews, and it includes a willingness to revise what the team thought it knew. The same authors distinguish internal sources, such as an organization's own memos, meeting minutes and reports, from external sources about the political, social, economic and technological context. They also distinguish codified knowledge, which is written down in reports, statistics and policy documents, from tacit knowledge, which lives in people's experience and comes out in interviews, focus groups and conversations.

Most scans in health use both modes. In the review by Charlton and colleagues (2021), the most common methods were literature reviews (71 percent of studies), key informant or semi-structured interviews (46 percent) and surveys (35 percent), and 53 percent of studies combined passive and active approaches.

1.5 How a Scan Differs from Related Products

A scan overlaps with several other products that health organizations commission, and the differences lie mainly in the question asked and the sources used. The table compares them.

The boundaries are porous. A scan often supplies the service side of a needs assessment, and a jurisdictional scan is a scan whose unit is a province or country (Section 3).

1.6 The Cedar Valley Scan Question

In Lesson 2 the team wrote its scan question with the same framework as its review question, treating organizations as the population: which organizations currently deliver community-based programs for socially isolated older adults, how those programs are designed, governed, funded and evaluated, in British Columbia and elsewhere in Canada. The team then wrote sub-questions, each of which points to the sources most likely to answer it.

The scan's methods were set out in a short appendix to the review protocol (Lesson 2). Section 2 describes each method and the ethical questions it raises.

Introduction

Section 1 showed that most scans combine passive methods, which gather information that already exists, with active methods, which generate new information from organizations and people. This section works through the four methods the Cedar Valley team used, in the order in which it used them. Each method filled gaps left by the one before it, as Figure 11.3 shows.

2.1 Document and Website Review

A document and website review searches the public record for programs and reads what it says about them. For a scan of community programs, the most useful sources are organization websites, annual reports, reports to funders, program brochures, municipal and health authority lists of community resources, provincial directories and the reports of funding programs. The Cedar Valley team began with the sources it had already found for the review. Lesson 5 described the targeted website searches, and Lesson 7 showed that the review excluded 12 documents from other sources because they described a program without evaluating it. Those 12 documents, together with many of the 26 grey-literature documents that the review included, became the first documents of the scan.

The team then searched sources chosen for the scan. These included the provincial 211 information and referral directory (bc211), which lists community and social services; the list of local programs funded through Better at Home, a provincially funded program that supports older adults to live independently; the community resource lists of British Columbia's regional health authorities; and the websites of municipalities and seniors' centres. Section 3 explains how these sources were combined into a sampling frame.

The documentation rules from Lesson 5 apply here. For each search the intern recorded the source, the date, the search terms or browsing path, the number of listings found and the person who searched. For each document kept, the intern saved a PDF or archived copy of the web page, because program websites change and disappear, so that a reader can later see exactly what the source said when the scan used it.

2.2 The Program Inventory

A program inventory is a running list of every candidate program the scan identifies, with the source or sources where each was found and the decision made about it. It plays the part that the reference library and screening record play in a review (Lesson 7), and as in a review the same item turns up in several sources. The team therefore distinguished a listing, meaning one mention of a program in one source, from a program, meaning the service itself. De-duplicating listings into programs comes first, and screening programs against the eligibility criteria (Section 3) comes second.

The inventory template below shows the fields the intern used, with an example entry for each of three kinds of decision. Candidate programs carry inventory codes, eligible programs later receive charting codes P01 to P18, and the descriptions are fictional.

Exclusion reasons were recorded from an ordered list, so that each excluded program has one reason and the counts add up, as in full-text screening (Lesson 7). The order was: (1) not currently operating; (2) based in a facility such as a long-term care home or hospital; (3) no component that addresses social connection; (4) not mainly for adults aged 65 and older; and (5) a one-time event. Because the scan was rapid, the intern made each decision and the evidence officer checked every exclusion and a sample of inclusions, and the two decided every unclear case together. Section 4 reports the counts.

2.3 Surveying Organizations

Documents rarely say how a program is funded, how many people it reaches or whether it is evaluated, and those were among the questions the planning team cared about most. A short survey of the organizations that run eligible programs can fill these gaps. An organizational survey asks one informed person, usually the program coordinator or manager, to report facts about the program on its behalf.

Several design principles apply. The survey should be short; the Cedar Valley survey took about ten minutes. It should ask only what documents cannot answer, and it can show what the team has already charted and ask the respondent to confirm or correct it. Closed items should have response options that cover every possibility, including "don't know", and questions about money can offer ranges and a "prefer not to say" option. Each item should ask about one thing and state its reference period, such as "in the past 12 months". The survey should be piloted with one or two people similar to the respondents, which the team did with the coordinators of two programs that fell outside the scan's eligibility criteria.

Contact procedures also affect response. Dillman, Smyth and Christian (2014) recommend a planned sequence of personalized contacts, each with a different purpose. Surveys of organizations tend to have lower response rates than surveys of individuals (Baruch and Holtom, 2008), so a scan should plan its follow-up from the start. The Cedar Valley team sent an advance email from the health authority's planning lead explaining the purpose, an invitation from the evidence officer with a link to the survey, two reminders a week apart and a final telephone call, and kept the survey open for three weeks (weeks 5 to 7).

Item 3 uses the intervention categories from the review's charting form (Lesson 8), so that the scan and the review can later be compared category by category (Section 4). Item 13 is a form of snowball sampling, discussed in Section 3. Of the 18 eligible programs, 11 completed the survey, a response rate of 61 percent (11 divided by 18). The team reported both numbers and compared respondents with non-respondents on what the documents showed, and found that 5 of the 7 non-responding programs were run entirely by volunteers, compared with 3 of the 11 that responded. Survey results therefore probably describe paid-staff programs better than volunteer-run ones, a likely case of non-response bias, and the report says so.

2.4 Key Informant Interviews

A key informant is a person who knows about a topic because of the position they hold, such as a program coordinator, a funder or a health authority manager. A key informant interview asks such a person about the program or system they know, more than about their own experience as an individual. Key informant interviews suit the how and why questions that a survey handles poorly, such as why referrals from clinicians are rare and what a newcomer should avoid. HSCI 207 Lesson 10 teaches how to write an interview guide, how to probe and how to pilot a guide; this section applies those skills to a scan.

The Cedar Valley interviews lasted 30 to 45 minutes and took place by video call or telephone in weeks 6 to 8. The evidence officer asked the questions and the intern took notes. With consent, calls were recorded so that notes could be checked, and within a day the intern completed a summary organized by the guide's topics. Each informant received the summary of their interview and was invited to correct it, a form of member checking. The main questions and probes of the guide appear below.

The team invited 10 programs to interview and 7 took part, one informant from each. Section 3 explains how the 10 were chosen, and Section 4 how the notes were analyzed.

2.5 Ethics, Consent and Data Governance

Surveys and interviews collect information from people, so a scan must settle early whether it needs research ethics review. In Canada, the Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS 2, 2022) sets out which activities count as research. Its Article 2.5 states that quality assurance and quality improvement studies, program evaluation activities and similar work, when used exclusively for assessment, management or improvement purposes, do not constitute research under the policy and do not fall within the scope of research ethics board review. Its Article 2.2 exempts research that relies exclusively on information that is publicly available, under stated conditions. A scan done by a health authority to plan its own services often falls under Article 2.5, but the judgement belongs to the organization's research ethics or quality improvement office, and plans to publish the scan as research can change the answer. HSCI 207 Lesson 5 covers research ethics review in Canada.

The Cedar Valley team asked the health authority's research ethics office, which judged the scan to be a planning activity outside the scope of research ethics board review. The team still followed ethical practice. Each invitation explained the purpose of the scan and how information would be reported, and taking part was voluntary. Programs were named in the report only with their permission, quotations were attributed by role, recordings were deleted once the summaries had been checked, and sensitive information about funding and staffing was reported in aggregate. As Lesson 6 described, no scan data were entered into any artificial intelligence tool.

Programs led by Indigenous organizations require particular care. Chapter 9 of TCPS 2 sets out expectations for research involving First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples, and the First Nations principles of OCAP (ownership, control, access and possession), developed by the First Nations Information Governance Centre, assert First Nations' control over data about their communities. As decided in Lesson 2, the Cedar Valley team planned its outreach to Indigenous-led programs with the health authority's Indigenous health team and agreed with each organization what information about its program would appear in the report.

Introduction

A review defines its population of studies with eligibility criteria and finds them with a documented search. A scan faces the same two tasks for programs, organizations or jurisdictions, with one added difficulty: no database indexes community programs, so the scan must assemble its own list before it can decide which entries belong.

3.1 Choosing the Unit of the Scan

The unit is the thing the scan counts and describes. Three units are common. A program is an organized service with its own activities and participants, such as a weekly walking group. An organization is the body that runs one or more programs, such as a seniors' society or a municipality. A jurisdiction is a government territory, such as a province, that sets policy and funding. The choice follows from the question. A question about what services exist for older adults calls for programs as units; a question about which organizations could partner with a health authority calls for organizations; a question about how provinces fund social prescribing calls for jurisdictions.

The Cedar Valley scan used the program as its unit, because the planning team wanted to know what kinds of programs existed and how each was funded and evaluated. The template also recorded the operating organization and any partners, because one organization may run several programs and one program may be delivered by several partners. The 18 eligible programs were run by 16 organizations: two organizations each ran two eligible programs. The Cedar Valley report states the unit at the top of every table, because counts of organizations and of programs differ.

3.2 Eligibility Criteria for Programs

Eligibility criteria for a scan work like those for a review (Lesson 2): each criterion should be clear enough that two people applying it to the same listing reach the same decision. The Cedar Valley criteria parallel the review's Population, Concept and Context, so that the scan and the review describe the same kinds of programs.

The 12-month rule for "currently operating" allows for programs that pause over the summer or between grants.

3.3 Building a Sampling Frame

A sampling frame is the list from which a study identifies or selects its units. An ideal frame contains every eligible unit exactly once and nothing else. A survey of physicians can often use a licensing register as its frame, but no single list of community programs for older adults exists in British Columbia, so the Cedar Valley team built its frame from six kinds of source. The table shows how many listings each source contributed.

Removing 21 duplicate listings left 43 unique candidate programs, and screening against the criteria left 18 eligible programs (Section 4 reports the reasons for exclusion). The frame closed at the end of week 7 so that the team had time to chart and verify every program.

Judging the completeness of the frame

A team can never be certain that a frame is complete, but the overlap among sources gives a useful signal. If most eligible programs appear in several independent sources, the sources are probably covering the same population well. If many appear in only one source, other programs probably appear in none. Figure 11.4 shows the overlap for the 18 eligible Cedar Valley programs. Thirteen appeared in two or more sources and 5 in only one, and 2 of those 5 were found only through referrals. Both were small volunteer-run programs, which suggests that the frame under-represents programs of that kind. The report states this limitation. Formal capture-recapture methods, which estimate a population's size from overlapping lists, assume independent lists, which directories that copy from one another rarely are, so the team used the overlap descriptively.

3.4 A Census or a Sample?

When the number of eligible units is small, a scan can include all of them, which is called a census. When it is large, or when a method is too costly to apply to every unit, the scan selects a sample. The choice can differ by method within the same scan. The Cedar Valley team charted all 18 programs from documents and sent the survey to all 18, because both steps were cheap. Interviews were expensive in time, so it selected programs for interview with purposive (judgement) sampling, which chooses units deliberately for what they can contribute. The cards describe four strategies that scans use.

For the interviews, the team listed the characteristics on which programs varied: main activity, location in the Cedar Valley region or elsewhere in British Columbia, urban or rural setting, type of operating organization, whether the program was Indigenous-led and whether it evaluated outcomes. It also decided to include programs that had not answered the survey, so that the interviews could hear from them. It invited 10 programs, 8 that had responded to the survey and 2 that had not, and 7 took part: 6 survey respondents and 1 non-respondent. Counting both methods, 12 of the 18 programs (11 by survey and 1 by interview only) provided information directly, and the other 6 were charted from documents alone.

The seven interviewed programs cover five of the six activity categories, both locations, both settings and four kinds of operator. No interviewed program was a one-to-one program in the Cedar Valley region, which the report notes as a gap in the interview sample.

3.5 Sampling Jurisdictions

A jurisdictional scan compares how provinces, territories or countries handle an issue, for example how each funds or governs a type of program. Canada has 10 provinces and 3 territories, so a national jurisdictional scan can often take a census of all 13; CADTH's process for environmental scans, for example, includes surveys of health care decision-makers across Canada (CADTH, 2015). When time is short, a scan selects jurisdictions purposively, for example those with a similar health system or a well-known model, and the report states which were included and why.

The Cedar Valley scan question also asked about programs elsewhere in Canada. With twelve weeks, the team chose a lighter method for this part. It selected four other provinces, chosen to vary by region and population size and to include provinces with publicly documented programs, and reviewed public documents and websites only, with no survey or interviews. It charted 9 programs from those provinces with a shortened version of the template. The report keeps these 9 separate from the 18 British Columbia programs, because they were found and described with different methods and cannot be counted together.

3.6 Building the Charting Template

A charting template is the form on which the scan records the same set of fields for every unit. As with the review's charting form (Lesson 8), each field answers part of the question, each has a definition and allowed values in a data dictionary, and the form is piloted before full use. Two features are particular to scans. Because information comes from several sources that may disagree, the template records the source of each entry. And because programs change, it records the date on which each program's information was last verified.

The Cedar Valley template appears below in abridged form. Its activity categories are those of the review's charting form (Lesson 8), which made the integration in Section 4 possible.

Three coding rules prevent common errors. First, the template distinguishes "not reported" (no source mentions it), "don't know" (the respondent did not know) and "not applicable" (the field does not apply), because the three mean different things when the team later counts programs. Second, when sources disagree, the team records the most recent direct report, usually the survey or the interview, and notes the conflict. Third, every entry carries its source.

Before charting all 18 programs, the intern and the evidence officer charted three programs independently and compared their entries. They agreed on 45 of 54 entries (3 programs with 18 entries each), or 83 percent. Of the 9 disagreements, 4 concerned the main activity of a seniors' centre that ran both drop-in groups and outreach visits, 3 concerned whether participant satisfaction surveys counted as outcome measurement, and 2 concerned which end date to record when a program had several funding sources. They added three rules to the data dictionary: the main activity is the one with the most contact hours, which is the rule the review used in Lesson 8; satisfaction surveys count as monitoring and not as outcome measurement; and the funding end date is that of the largest source.

Introduction

The Cedar Valley planning team asked two questions: which community-based interventions have been evaluated for reducing loneliness or social isolation among older adults, and which programs of this kind operate in British Columbia now. The rapid scoping review answers the first and the environmental scan answers the second. A decision about what kind of community connector program to launch, and with which partners, needs both answers read together. This section shows how the team combined the two products, how it analyzed the scan data, and how it reported the scan so that readers could judge it and update it.

4.1 Why Combine a Scan with a Review

A review and a scan look at the same field from two sides. The review describes what research has found about programs, wherever they ran; most of the 42 studies in the Cedar Valley review were conducted outside Canada. The scan describes what is available locally, whether or not anyone has studied it; most of the 18 British Columbia programs have never been evaluated in a published study. Read together, the two products show where local practice and research evidence coincide, where local programs operate with little evidence behind them, and where the evidence describes models that no local program offers.

Combining the two is common practice: in the review by Charlton and colleagues (2021), a literature review was the most frequent method used within scans. In the Cedar Valley project the literature component is a full rapid scoping review, so the integration needs to be planned explicitly.

4.2 Levels of Integration

Combining a scan and a review is a form of mixed-methods work, and the mixed-methods literature offers a useful vocabulary. Fetters, Curry and Creswell (2013) describe integration at three levels. At the design level, the components may run in sequence, with one informing the next, or in parallel, with their results brought together at the end. At the methods level, one component can build on another, for example by using its categories, or connect to it, for example by drawing its sample from the other's results. At the level of interpretation and reporting, the findings can be woven together in narrative or set side by side in a joint display. HSCI 207 Lesson 6, Section 2.4, and HSCI 207 Lesson 12, Section 3.6, treat integration levels and joint displays more fully; the definitions here are enough to follow this lesson without that course. The tabs show where each level appeared in the Cedar Valley project.

4.3 A Joint Display for Cedar Valley

A joint display is a table or figure that places the results of two components side by side so that readers can see how they relate and what new interpretation their combination supports. Guetterman, Fetters and Creswell (2015) described joint displays as a way of integrating quantitative and qualitative results in health sciences research, and the same idea works for a review and a scan. Shared categories make a joint display possible. Because the Cedar Valley scan charted programs with the review's intervention categories, each row of the display compares like with like.

The display supports three interpretations that neither product supports alone. First, the local supply of programs is concentrated in group activities, where trial evidence is most plentiful, although its certainty is low. Second, the community connector model that Cedar Valley plans to launch rests on very uncertain evidence and has only four counterparts in the province, two of which measure outcomes; this strengthens the case, made in Lesson 8, for launching the program with an evaluation built in, and suggests that the team could adopt a short outcome measure already used by those programs. Third, a connector program depends on having programs to refer people to, and the scan shows which kinds of programs exist and where. All results in this section belong to the fictional case and are illustrative.

4.4 Analyzing Scan Data

Counts with denominators and sources

Most scan results are counts and proportions, and the most frequent reporting error is a proportion whose denominator is unclear. Because the survey and interviews reached only some programs, each count must say which programs it describes and where the information came from. "Seven of the 18 programs measured at least one participant outcome (3 through an external evaluation), according to surveys, evaluation reports and program documents" is a complete statement. "Of the 12 programs that provided information directly, 8 reported that their largest source of funding ends within three years, and 3 reported a formal referral pathway from primary care" is another. The table shows the largest funding source for all 18 programs, drawn from the survey where available and from annual reports and websites otherwise.

Summarizing interview notes

The interview summaries were analyzed with framework analysis, also called the framework method (Gale et al., 2013), which suits structured questions and short timelines. The team built a matrix with one row for each of the 7 programs and one column for each topic of the guide, wrote a short summary in each cell with the informant's key phrases, and then read down the columns to find patterns and differences. HSCI 207 Lesson 11 teaches framework analysis in more depth. In the illustrative Cedar Valley matrix, most informants said that participants arrived by word of mouth and that links with clinics depended on individual clinicians. Informants with short grants described a cycle of hiring, training and losing staff, several said they would measure outcomes if given a short shared tool, rural informants named transport as the main barrier, and most advised a new connector program to refer people into existing programs and bring resources such as volunteer training.

The team then compared what different sources said about the same topic, a step called triangulation. The survey showed that 3 of 12 programs had a formal referral pathway from primary care; the interviews explained why the number was low and what had made the pathway work in program P08. Where sources disagreed, the report says so.

4.5 Reporting a Scan

Charlton and colleagues (2024) noted that the EQUATOR Network, which catalogues reporting guidelines for health research, listed no reporting guideline for environmental scans, and that many published scans describe their methods incompletely. Until one exists, a scan can borrow from the guidelines for each of its components: PRISMA-S for the searches of websites and directories (Lessons 4 and 5), PRISMA-ScR for charting and summarizing (Lesson 10), the Checklist for Reporting Results of Internet E-Surveys (CHERRIES; Eysenbach, 2004) for an online survey, and the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research (COREQ; Tong, Sainsbury and Craig, 2007) for interviews. The checklist below gathers the items the Cedar Valley team reported.

Lesson 7 noted that the scan is reported separately from the review's PRISMA flow diagram, because its counts describe programs and people. Figure 11.5 shows the flow of programs from identification to participation. Its structure follows the PRISMA diagram, with boxes that must reconcile: 64 listings minus 21 duplicates gives 43 candidate programs, and 43 minus 25 exclusions gives 18 eligible programs.

Limitations and currency

Every scan describes a moment in time, so its report should state the date to which its information is current, and a reader in two years should treat it as a historical record until it is updated. The Cedar Valley report states that program information was current at the end of week 10 and lists the scan's known limitations: the frame probably under-represents small volunteer-run programs (Section 3.3); volunteer-run programs were also less likely to answer the survey (Section 2.3); survey and interview information is self-reported and may present programs favourably; the interview sample included no one-to-one program in the Cedar Valley region; and programs in other provinces were described from documents only. The team kept the inventory, saved copies and template so that the scan could be updated.

4.6 Worked Example: The Cedar Valley Scan Report

The Cedar Valley scan report runs to about twelve pages plus appendices. Open each part to see what it contains.

The Cedar Valley team now has a charted review of 42 studies and 26 grey-literature documents, a scan of 18 British Columbia programs and a joint display that links them. Lesson 12 turns these into a report written to PRISMA 2020 and its extensions and an evidence brief for the planning team.

Bringing It All Together

This lesson followed the fictional Cedar Valley evidence team through the environmental scan that it ran beside its rapid scoping review. An environmental scan collects and interprets information about current programs, services, policies, organizations and trends in a defined setting, to inform planning. The method began in business planning, where Aguilar described four modes of scanning in 1967, and health services and public health organizations now use it to plan programs, compare jurisdictions and find gaps and partners. Published definitions still vary, and Charlton and colleagues found that most scans combine passive methods, which gather existing information, with active methods, which generate new information from organizations and people.

The Cedar Valley team combined four methods. It searched directories, websites and documents and saved a copy of each source; it built a program inventory that turned 64 listings into 43 candidate programs and 18 eligible ones, each with a recorded decision; it surveyed all 18 programs, of which 11 responded; and it interviewed leads from 7 programs chosen for maximum variation. It judged the completeness of its sampling frame from the overlap among sources, kept 9 programs from other provinces separate because they were found with different methods, and charted every program with a piloted template that recorded the source and date of each entry.

Finally, the team integrated the scan with the review through shared intervention categories and a joint display, which showed that the connector model it plans rests on very uncertain evidence and has few local counterparts. It reported the scan with a flow of programs, counts that state their denominators and sources, a statement of limitations and a date of currency.

The final reflection asks you to design a complete environmental scan for a new planning question, drawing on all four sections of the lesson.

Final Knowledge Assessment

Definitions of the terms, tools and people introduced in this lesson on environmental scans.