Investing for Outcomes
What is it?
Outcomes is the buzzword in public sector circles, but it's been in our vocabulary for a long time.
We've built up lots of expertise and an impressive track record of working with organisations to introduce outcomes-based working practices, showing how it helps them become more effective, with improved performance and better results.
"What gets measured, gets done"
How do we do it?
Public services currently face a number of challenges, the most fundamental of which is the question of how people benefit from their activities. The crucial thing about outcomes is an awareness of the value of measurable end results.
What is important is the target - i.e. the end result. For example, focusing on the number of clients who succeed in kicking an drug addiction rather than the number of referrals to the drug treatment service. Hundreds of people may be referred but if few of them are successful, then the service is not performing and its principal role is a provider of jobs for the staff!
Outcome Management
Outcome Management is a performance measuring tool. It says that the achievement of the target is the driving force. On the way to reaching it, there are usually several stages - called milestones - where progress checks can be taken and adjustments made or new ideas introduced. It's just like map reading on a journey - you might go slightly off-course but can rectify problems on the way and still get to your destination.
In order to measure improved outcomes, you have to start by quantifying goals, setting milestones and put them into a context to create a plan for performance improvement or organisational change.
Outcome Funding
Outcome Funding is a business-like approach to contracting , popular with entrepreneurial funders and service commissioners. It focuses on investing to get results, rather than more traditional financing of activities. Outcome funding buys change or improvement, rather than buying service. It's a way of working that is performance-oriented and targeted, using questions such as 'what will be achieved?' and not 'what will you do with the money?'.
Outcome-Based Commissioning
Outcome-Based Commissioning is an improved way of commissioning. Over the years contracting managers and their purchasing teams have shaped behaviours through such devices as defining inputs, setting output targets, unit costing and lowest price. This has largely served the purpose of controlling expenditure but has allowed providers (and commissioners) to ignore an obligation to establish a clear measurable relationship between the outcomes to be achieved and the outputs and processes put in place to deliver them. It's final outcomes that drive success; not process or activity.
Outcome-Based Commissioning focuses not on activity and process, but on getting results. The key point is that use of public money should be judged by the gains achieved for their customers. There's less emphasis on inputs and activity (e.g. how many workshops, hours of counseling, training sessions were carried out) and more focus on results and outcomes (like how many jobs created, court appearances avoided, homeless people housed or improvements made to community facilities).
Recent CPI projects:
Bolton Drug and Alcohol Action Team
Commissioners and providers alike in the town felt the need to understand better who delivered what and to who, the cost and quality of these services. CPI's team set produced ten service specifications for the overall service plus the creation of an outcome management framework to ensure that future specifications are easy to define and make a lasting impact.
Bristol Children and Young People's Partnership
CPI has now trained 60 local commissioners, as well as members of the strategic partnership, in our outcome based commissioning approach. We designed bespoke training for each commissioning cohort ranging from 5-day module based training to 1-day overviews.
We have also worked with the provider sector, mentoring staff from the City Council and the local Council for Voluntary Sector to train up all local voluntary providers. And we are working with the Parenting Team supporting an outcome-based tendering process for a new 2-year round of parenting programme.
As a result services commissioned through the Partnership will adopt a common outcome focus working collaboratively with providers to deliver better results for the City's families.
Stoke-on-Trent Safer City Partnership
Working collaborative with commissioners and current providers of adults and children's substance misuse services across Stoke-on-Trent we mapped existing care pathways and results, and agreed what we could do to increase long-term outcomes for clients. From this CPI developed a set of outcome-based service specifications.
We are now supporting the DAAT Joint Commissioning Group through its next round of tendering and commissioning against these specifications.
Co-commissioning strategy for NOMS
New commissioning arrangements are being created between PCTs and ROMs throughout England to make sure that offenders, both in custody and in the community, are given adequate and appropriate health and social care services. In three pilot areas, CPI is helping research the opportunities, challenges and possibilities of health and criminal justice services working together.
So what?
Contact CPI to discuss how we can help you achieve better public sector outcomes. Our guarantee to you is a free phone call to kick start some ideas within 48 hours of your query. Call Bernadette Bruton on 020 7922 7822 or e-mail bernadette.bruton@publicinnovation.org.uk.
