Do you want to ensure your services and supports are focused on what matters to the people you support?
To help you embed personal outcome focused or person centred approaches within your organisation, you might need to:
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Build knowledge and understanding of personal outcomes focused approaches amongst your staff.
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Develop a shared understanding of how your service contributes to improving outcomes for people and what this means for the way you deliver and record your work.
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Improve your IT systems to ensure they support good practice and generate the intelligence you need.
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Evidence the difference your personal outcomes focused services and supports make to people and make the case for funding.
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Improve implementation of Self Directed Support.
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Change the conversation in your organisation to focus more clearly on strengths and what matters to people.
We offer a practical and meaningful approach that will help you move forward in your journey.
We have extensive experience of working with pioneering health and social care organisations, supporting them to improve their work.
Our work in this area is led by Ailsa Cook, a pioneer of personal outcome approaches. Ailsa is the Co-founder and Director of Matter of Focus and a Fellow of Practice at the University of Oxford Government Outcomes Lab. She is a leader in the field of outcomes and is a co-originator of the Talking Points: Personal Outcomes Approach (available to download here).
Ailsa has more than 20 years of experience of working with health and social care organisations implementing personal outcome focused approaches. Her research and practical support has shaped the practice of 1000s of health and social care organisations and informed policy development in Scotland and Wales.
We provide expert consultancy and software to support you.
Training and capacity building
We work with Dr Emma Miller, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Strahclyde and facilitator of the Personal Outcomes Network to deliver engaging training to staff unpacking what it means to focus on personal outcomes and exploring how they put learning into practice.
Strategic consultancy
We provide expertise advice and guidance to diverse organisations and programmes ensure that their approaches to improving outcomes for people are evidence informed and achievable.
Evaluation support
We bring tried and tested methods to support you to build a shared vision of success and empower your team to contribute meaningfully to bringing together different types of data to understand and track your progress towards outcomes.
Software to structure your evaluation
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→
Our free evaluation framework for personal outcome focused services
We have developed a template framework that can support you to think through how your organisation might better evidence its contribution to improving outcomes for the people you support. Access the template here.
Some of our work in this area
East Ayrshire Health & Social Care Partnership
East Ayrshire has long been recognised as pioneering in their work to implement the self directed support policy agenda. Following our work with East Ayrshire HSCP’s Thinking Differently team, we are working on a project to support them to address data and practice gaps, particularly around recording outcomes. This is part of their need to refresh their approach, in light of many contextual challenges.
The project is being delivered in partnership with Dr Emma Miller, a senior research fellow at the University of Strathclyde, co-author of Talking Points with Ailsa Cook, and an independent consultant specialising in supporting health and care organisations implement personal outcome approaches and SDS, linking practice and strategy.
Matter of Focus is leading on outcome mapping and OutNav. Emma Miller is supporting a cycle of practice improvement to address data and practice gaps, particularly around recording outcomes.
NHS Lothian House of Care
NHS Lothian House of Care is focused on working across the health and social care system to encourage and enable more person centred and preventative approaches. We worked with them to map the contribution of different people in the system to achieving this. They used OutNav to evaluate the specific work they’re doing with GP practices and across the health and social care system.
Thistle Foundation
Our work with the Thistle Foundation has helped them to map how the work of the whole organisation contributes to improving outcomes for the people and communities they work. They are using OutNav to help them systematically evidence key aspects of their work including training and funded projects.
In 2020 we held a webinar with the Lothian House of Care collaboration between Thistle Foundation and NHS Lothian available to watch here.
Midlothian HSCP
We have worked closely with Midlothian Health and Social Care Partnership since 2020 to help them tell the story of the difference they make to the people of Midlothian. This work has been over two phases, with the first focusing on mapping and evaluating work in relation to strategic commissioning, frailty work and the Number 11 service.
In phase two we are working with new service areas, including unpaid carers and learning disability and autism, to explore their work in a way which is consistent with a strategic level outcome map for the Partnership. Working in this way is highly innovative but challenging, and our shared learning on how best to use OutNav at partnership level has been considerable.