Benefits

People who use services and carers need reassurance that:
  • treatments and care provided are producing results for them as individuals, and
  • outcomes related to their care and support are monitored on an ongoing basis to show that services are delivering benefits for the people who use services.
Although measuring outcomes includes collecting information, at its heart, it is a long-term development, involving important cultural changes in working practices for practitioners and managers at all levels. In the long term measuring outcomes will provide benefits such as:
  • enable managers to understand more fully the effectiveness of service delivery
  • support dialogue between service users carers and clinicians
  • track the progress of individuals, within and between services
  • allow data to be brought together to provide a national picture of performance
  • provide essential data in the delivery of service redesign and improvement
  • enable clinical teams to improve their treatment and care through processes of reflection, action and review

Evidence gathered from a Department of Health Pilot showed that implementation of outcomes measurement is best achieved by following a developmental path that allows sufficient flexibility Further information on how this can be best achieved can be found in the Best Practice Guidance published by NIMHE/DoH

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