Are you wrestling with how to meaningfully evaluate the difference your work is making to the people you support?

In this webinar, Matter of Focus director Ailsa Cook draws on her extensive experience working in this area to take a deep look at the issue of evaluating personal outcomes and share our tried and tested, practical approach to doing this.

Recorded live on Thursday, 25 May 2023 – Watch the recording

Measuring what matters

Effective health and social care services are focused on what matters to the people they support.

In Scotland we have been leading the way, developing and implementing approaches such as the Talking Points: Personal Outcomes Approach that was co-developed by Dr Ailsa Cook with Dr Emma Miller from the Personal Outcomes Network.

Talking Points has been implemented by 1000s of organisations across Scotland and beyond. Having good conversations with people about what matters to them and how services and supports can help is core to Scottish social care policy and practice and becoming increasingly mainstream in health settings too.

However, less progress has been made with how to evaluate whether outcomes have improved for people and what, if anything, the contribution of services and supports has been to this. This poses a real challenge for people at every level of the health and social care system. Without this information:

  • Practitioners don’t have all the information they need to support someone and can’t be confident they are doing the best job they can.
  • Managers don’t know how effective their service is, where the gaps are and what they are doing really well and could invest more in.
  • Strategic leads can’t prioritise resources effectively or robustly demonstrate that they are making good use of public resources.
  • Scrutiny bodies don’t have the information they need to assure the quality and impact of services.
  • The Government can’t know whether services and supports are making the contribution to National Outcomes they hope and where more investment is required.

Another more immediate challenge we frequently observe is that without this information it is really hard for pioneering, relational, preventative services to effectively evidence their contribution to improving outcomes for people and make the case for continued investment.

About this webinar

Ailsa has spent the past 20 years exploring this issue with 100s of colleagues and organisations, most recently in our work at Matter of Focus. In this webinar she will share learning from this work, including:

  • what is and isn’t possible in measuring and evaluating personal outcomes
  • a tried and tested approach to doing this in practice
  • case examples from organisations who are evaluating personal outcomes and critically using this information to ensure they make the best difference possible to the people and communities they support.