Authors: Lauren Gibson (Mind Australia ),Dr. Edith Botchway (Mind Australia, AU), Dr. Laura Hayes (Mind Australia, AU)Outcome measurement in mental health services is recommend as best practice and provides an opportunity for clients and staff to track progress and navigate the complex road to recovery together. However, there are many barriers to embedding outcome measures in mental health services, including time constraints, low perceived value among staff and clients, and not receiving feedback on outcomes regularly. To overcome these challenges, a national not-for-profit provider of residential and non-residential psychosocial support services, created an innovative approach for designing and implementing outcome measures. The objective of our presentation is to describe this approach which has resulted in average outcome measure completion rates of over 80% across 73 services in Australia.
Design
We believe the key to achieving these completion rates is through understanding the needs of outcome measures end-users, including clients, carers, service providers, centralised support teams, and funding bodies. In this presentation we will share how we:
- "Begin with the end in mind" through working with stakeholders to create user personas and program logics to identify meaningful outcomes and survey instruments.
- Design easy to use digital tools to record quality data and provide stakeholders with dashboards to review their outcomes in real time through visualising data at an individual client level, and service level.
Implementation
Also key to embedding outcome measures is having a structured, multi-stage approach for implementation, with tailored support provided to:
- Prepare services (e.g., Training)
- Install and embed outcome measures in routine practice (e.g., Service champions)
- Maintain fidelity over time (e.g., Performance monitoring)
The presentation will highlight the salient barriers and enablers identified during each design and implementation stage.
Overall, the presentation will provide a practical example of how to design and implement outcome measures in mental health services to ensure they are adding value for relevant stakeholders and enabling efficient and meaningful evaluation.
