Would your health and social care organisation or partnership like to be more outcome focused?
Are you interested in understanding how your work contributes to the outcomes that are most important in your locality?
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We know from our work with many health and social care organisations that embedding a focus on outcomes strategically is key to enabling effective outcome focused practice and reporting across the organisation and can help streamline reporting across multiple services or organisations.
Our approach works at a strategic and service level.
We support teams at different levels to articulate how their work contributes to the key outcomes you care about. This often leads to one strategic outcome map, with related programme or service maps nested below.
Through expert consultancy and our software OutNav, we can help you:
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Strengthen your focus on outcomes by developing a clear and shared framework expressed in language that everyone can understand that makes visible how staff, services, partners and communities contribute to strategic outcomes.
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Engage staff, partners, and communities in understanding what success looks like.
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Streamline and integrate data and information into one place, integrating existing data systems and qualitative and quantitative data.
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Improve performance reporting, bringing together national indicators and targets with the measures that matter to you into one coherent framework.
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Self-evaluate for strategic inspection purposes.
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Plan, develop and evaluate new programmes and services.
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Embed a culture of learning and improvement.
We understand the data challenges you must overcome to make good decisions and be evidence-informed:
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What intelligence is needed or expected for people make a good decision?
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How do we demonstrate the value of qualitative data to understand people-based services?
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People lack confidence and skills in analysing qualitative data, such as feedback from people.
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It takes a long time to access the data and reports we need from IT systems.
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There is a lack of protected time for analysis and reporting, so learning is lost.
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How do we draw together learning from across different areas, and feed learning from practice to strategy?
The consultancy support we offer
Context workshops
We help you examine and create a shared understanding of the wider factors beyond your control that influence the same change and are likely to help and hinder your work. Such contextual factors include relational and individual components as well as material and societal drivers, including norms and predominant values.
Taking time to think and talk about context will help you:
- identify key risks to your initiative or work
- think through how risks can be mitigated and build on opportunities to improve or strengthen your initiative
- establish reasonable expectations about what an initiative might achieve given the time and resources available and contextual opportunities and limitations.
To help you understand the context of your work, we use an adapted version of the evidence-based “ISM Framework” created by the Scottish Government.
‘Success story’ sessions
We support your team and stakeholders to share ways they have intervened in the system that seem to work – this can help to build up an understanding of the main change mechanisms that look promising for the work and forms the basis of the outcome mapping stage.
Outcome mapping workshops, meetings and presentations
Outcome mapping is fully a participatory process to understand and build a theory of change: linking activities to the change that you seek.
These sessions can include a wide range of stakeholders who can bring a perspective on the system and the change needed, or we can coordinate a round of consultation to ensure important perspectives are included.
The resulting outcome maps form the basis for assessment plans.
Assessment plans
Working together, we think about how change will be monitored and what combination of reflection, feedback and data is needed to understand change in order to learn, improve and keep the programme on track.
Software that holds it all together
OutNav is our secure, cloud-based software that provides a single place to hold your outcome maps and assessment plans, bringing together your data and evidence for ongoing learning, monitoring and improvement, with clear and professional reporting functions. Explore OutNav→
Some of our work with health and social care organisations
Edinburgh Community Health Forum
We supported Edinburgh Community Health Forum to demonstrate how working together as a collective of health organisations made a difference to health outcomes for the communities they cared about. We then worked with individual service providers to help them set out their own outcome maps and track the difference their organisation makes.
Midlothian Health & Social Care Partnership (HSCP)
Midlothian HSCP first used our approach to evaluate and successfully argue for continued funding for their Wellbeing Service.
Since then, we have supported them to mainstream the approach across the partnership to underpin their focus on outcomes for people in practice and a robust approach to outcome focused governance and assurance at a strategic level.
The Health Foundation
Q, led by the Health Foundation, is a community of thousands of people across the UK and Ireland, collaborating to improve the safety and quality of health and care. Q Exchange is the dedicated funding programme that activates ideas, with this year’s funded projects responding to the call for ‘How can improvement be used to reduce delays accessing health and care services?’ We are working with grant holders to provide capacity building and upskilling around evaluation.
The Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland (the ALLIANCE)
The ALLIANCE is the national third sector intermediary for health and social care. With a growing membership of over 3,500, the ALLIANCE deliver diverse and complex programmes of activity with people and organisations, to improve the wellbeing of people and communities across Scotland and towards a vision where everyone has a strong voice and enjoys their right to live well with dignity and respect.
We are supporting the ALLIANCE to take an organisation-wide and programme-level approach to impact measurement and evaluation across these diverse work streams aligned to their strategic plan, with a focus on capacity building and learning.
