Benefits and pitfalls for commissioners

Benefits

The main benefit of taking an outcomes approach is to focus everyone - service users, service providers and commissioners - on positive change. This means shifting the focus from the services being delivered to the change that happens as a result. The main benefits are:

Creating a learning culture amongst service providers

The primary aim of the Star is to enable service providers to be outcome focused, learning organisations. Measuring their own outcomes makes it possible for service providers themselves to judge their own achievements and weaknesses and improve their services accordingly. By encouraging service providers to use the Star and use it well, commissioners can contribute to services raising their game. Find out more about measuring outcomes.

Improving keywork

Using the Outcomes Star™ makes keywork more effective by making it more focused on service user change, more systematic and consistent and covering a wider range of issues in greater depth. Find out more about improving keywork.

Monitoring service provider performance

Outcomes Star™ data can provide useful information about the performance of a service provider. Output, quality and user satisfaction data are very useful but only outcomes data answers the central question of whether service users are actually getting closer to the goal of independence whilst receiving the service. The Outcomes Star™ gives a much richer and more detailed picture of the changes taking place within a service than the Department of Communities and Local Government’s outcomes form by measuring more precisely where service users are when they arrive in a service and where they are at a later point in time in relation to ten key aspects of their life.

A more meaningful approach to value for money

By focusing on outcomes instead of services, commissioners can take a more meaningful approach to value for money – i.e. the outcomes achieved for their money rather than the cost of services delivered.

Greater room for innovation

In addition, commissioners who focus on outcomes rather than services in their tenders allow providers flexibility and room for innovation in the way they deliver those outcomes.

A framework for planning services

The ladder of change underpinning the Star can provide a helpful framework for planning and commissioning services. Find out more about service planning.

Pitfalls

In our experience, where commissioners support and encourage providers to measure outcomes it provides a positive incentive to agencies to raise their game. Allowing time and support further encourages providers to choose to focus on and measure their outcomes in ways that work for them. However, requiring the use of any tool without active buy-in from service providers, not allowing a realistic time for implementation, and interpreting outcomes information in a simplistic way will all turn the use of the Outcomes Star™ (or any other tool) into a ‘tick box’ exercise which does not deliver any of the benefits described above and may even distort measurement of service delivery priorities.

Further, competition for contracts is likely to introduce incentives not to share learning about what works - and what doesn't - based on outcomes data. In our view, this is a danger inherent in the use of a commissioning model for the provision of social care. Our focus as Triangle within this model is on ways to enable and encourage positive and intelligent use of outcomes to maximise a learning agenda and minimise concerns raised by sharing outcomes data.

Further guidelines on how commissioners can use the Outcomes Star™ well and ensure that measurement leads to better outcomes for vulnerable people.