Study title

This action research project worked with 8 health and social care organisations to support them to go through a cycle of capture, analysis and use of data on personal outcomes collected during routine administrative processes. It is not ethically possible to upload the raw data the organisations worked from, instead this collection includes the reports written by each organisation summarising their findings and the learning from the work. Policy and practice across the UK and beyond is committed to improving the lives of people who use services and unpaid carers. Over the past five to ten years there has been a particular concern to shift health and social care systems away from an exclusive focus on their own inputs, processes and outputs to give a more prominent focus to personal outcomes for people using services and unpaid carers. In this context the term personal outcomes is used to refer to both the impact and end results of services and supports on a persons life and more simply, what matters to people. The proposed project builds on a seven year programme of knowledge exchange and service improvement that has been led by two of the applicants (Dr Ailsa Cook and Dr Emma Miller) and funded by the Joint Improvement Team in Scotland. This programme, known as Talking Points, has involved work with more than 130 organisations to support the development of outcomes focussed practice. A key finding emerging from the Talking Points programme is that limited capacity and skills in the analysis of qualitative and quantitative personal outcomes information within health and social care organisations constitutes a significant barrier to effective outcomes focussed project. Furthermore, this issue is exacerbated by the predominance of performance cultures that prioritise consistency, comparability and measurability of information over meaning. Over the past year 15 partner organisations have worked together to develop this proposal for funding from the ESRC. The...