July 1, 2014

Measuring Our Impact

Across the UK the Comprehensive Spending Review is making a big impact, not just on the lives of individuals but on organisations like ours. There just isn’t the money there once was and organisations are having to show that the work they do is having the desired impact.

Methodologies such as ‘Impact Reporting’ or ‘Social Return on Investment’ (SROI) are helping many organisations show that the work they are doing is having a positive impact, helping them to get ahead of the game by showing commissioners why their service is important. For this reason, we’ve started to look at our approach with a specialist consultant. Over the coming months she will be working with Lena O’Donnell from our Mi Team, Debbie Wright, Head of Service: Home and Communities for Merseyside, Viv Graham from Liverpool Health Trainer Service and Rachael Stott, Head of Communications. Together they will be working with Julie Rawlinson, Service Manager for our Post-natal Depression Service, going through the process of developing an Impact Assessment system that works for PND.

The ultimate aim of this piece of work will be to develop a toolkit that can be utilised across PSS to start looking at how we measure our impact in every service. Of course, we’re still in the early days and just looking at PND at this time, but, interestingly we are finding that we have a series of ultimate outcomes for that service that will be applicable to other services across PSS, including improved mental wellbeing and an increase in independence and employablity potential.
If we can get these systems right and integrated into individual services in appropriate ways, we’ll have a strong tool up our sleeve to show a range of stakeholders (including our commissioners and other service purchasers) that what we’re doing works.

We want a system that ultimately reduces our teams’ workloads by making it easier to monitor and fine tune our services, so that each person that uses them receives the maximum value they can.

“By knowing more about the impact we’re having we can make a bigger difference. We can be very clear about what we want to achieve and collect information to make sure it’s actually working. Where it is we can share this, and where it isn’t, we can learn from it.”

Lesley Dixon, CEO