PUBH 6213 Week 3 Criteria Map Example

Six Criteria, Six Places to Find the Points: A Review Criteria Map Matching a Composite School Hearing Follow-Up Proposal's Planned Sections to the Announcement's Scoring Language, With Its Empty Cells Marked

Student Name

Walden University

PUBH 6213: Public Health Grant Writing

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Six Criteria, Six Places to Find the Points: A Review Criteria Map Matching a Composite School Hearing Follow-Up Proposal's Planned Sections to the Announcement's Scoring Language, With Its Empty Cells Marked

Why a Map Before a Draft

Reviewers score each criterion separately, usually with a scoring sheet beside the application, and they look for the passage that answers each one. A strong program can lose points simply because the answer is in the wrong section or uses different words from the announcement. This map takes the six review criteria of the composite Rural Child Health Access Grants announcement, lists the terms each criterion uses, assigns each to a planned section of the Tamarack County Health Department's narrative and marks where the current plan has nothing to say.

The Map

Table 1

Review Criteria, Funder Terms and Planned Sections

Note. Criteria and terms come from the composite announcement; statuses reflect the team's planning notes.

Reading the Empty Cells

Three cells are empty, and they are worth 40 points between them. The work plan and evaluation plan are empty because the program's objectives have not been written, and both depend on that step. That makes the objectives the team's first drafting task. The budget cell is empty for the same reason: the announcement asks reviewers to judge whether costs are "aligned with the work plan," which cannot be assessed until the work plan exists.

The Partial Cells

The approach criterion is the heaviest at 25 points, and its evidence is ready. A cluster-randomized trial in rural Alaska found that school-based telemedicine referral after hearing screening led to follow-up within nine months for 68.5% of referred children, compared with 32.1% under standard referral to primary care (Emmett et al., 2022). What is missing is a description of who does what: which partner rescreens, who schedules, who conducts the remote evaluation and who tells the family. The announcement's phrase "partners' roles" signals that reviewers will look for named responsibilities, so the approach section must describe them in plain sentences, not only in letters attached at the back.

Organizational capacity is partial because the department has managed state grants before but has no position descriptions written for the new care coordinator. The announcement asks for "staffing," and a reviewer will look for a description of each funded role and its qualifications.

The Strong Cell and Its Risk

Need is the strongest section. The local referral logs show a gap large enough to persuade any reviewer, and national data add weight: in one national survey, 14.9% of children aged 6 to 19 had measurable hearing loss in at least one ear (Niskar et al., 1998). The risk is overreach. That national figure describes children's hearing, not follow-up failure, and the narrative must keep the two separate. The map assigns the national figure one sentence and gives the local follow-up rate the opening paragraph.

Matching the Funder's Words

Each section will use the announcement's own terms where they apply. The problem statement will use "delay" and "documented gap"; the evaluation plan will name a "baseline" and separate "process" from "outcome" measures. Matching words is not decoration. It shortens the reviewer's search and makes the scoring sheet easier to fill in.

Order of Work

Objectives first, then work plan and evaluation together, then budget, then approach roles and capacity attachments, then the problem statement last, when its claims can be checked against everything else. This order follows the empty cells rather than the order of the narrative. A one-page logic model will be sketched alongside the objectives, so that inputs, activities, outputs and outcomes stay lined up across the work plan, evaluation and budget (W. K. Kellogg Foundation, 2004).

References

Emmett, S. D., Platt, A., Turner, E. L., Gallo, J. J., Labrique, A. B., Inglis, S. M., Jenson, C. D., Parnell, H. E., Wang, N.-Y., Hicks, K. L., Egger, J. R., Halpin, P. F., Yong, M., Ballreich, J., & Robler, S. K. (2022). Mobile health school screening and telemedicine referral to improve access to specialty care in rural Alaska: A cluster-randomised controlled trial. The Lancet Global Health, 10(7), e1023-e1033. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(22)00184-X

Niskar, A. S., Kieszak, S. M., Holmes, A., Esteban, E., Rubin, C., & Brody, D. J. (1998). Prevalence of hearing loss among children 6 to 19 years of age: The Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. JAMA, 279(14), 1071-1075. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.279.14.1071

W. K. Kellogg Foundation. (2004). Logic model development guide. https://wkkf.issuelab.org/resource/logic-model-development-guide.html