Copyright and licensing

Serving the sector with high quality tools

We believe that the best way to serve service users and enable organisations to work effectively is to make available high quality tools which are widely recognised and applied across a sector. This approach:

  • Saves time and resources because organisations don’t have to develop their own tools from scratch
  • Allows organisations to focus their energy on effective implementation
  • Provides a common language and shared methodologies across a sector
  • Enables data to be shared and compared
  • Means that service users can take their tool with them as the move along the Care Pathway.

For this reason we make the Outcomes Star tools available free of charge in pdf form on this website to support this sector-wide adoption. Training is not compulsory but is strongly recommended to ensure effective implementation. Licences are available for organisations who wish to integrate the Star into their IT systems or paperwork or to use it commercially.

Copyright control to maintain quality and consistency

We retain the copyright of the tools and the terms of publication do not allow organisations to make changes to the wording of the Outcomes Star™ or the scales. While we understand the desire to customise the Star to meet the needs of individual services, wide consultation and discussion has indicated that allowing this would not serve the wider needs of sectors as a whole, for the following reasons:

  • The official versions of the Outcomes Star have been tested and re-tested many times within their sector to create tools that are coherent and practical. Changes are often made without a full understanding of the issues that have been considered in ensuring the overall integrity of the tool and therefore undermine the quality of the tool
  • A number of unofficial versions of the Outcomes Star™ in circulation would damage the credibility of the tool – particularly if some of the versions are of poor quality
  • When clients move to different projects it is confusing if different versions of the same tool are used
  • One of the benefits of the Outcomes Star™ is that all users who use the Star Online contribute to the development of a national outcomes evidence base. If there are different versions in circulation then the outcomes measured on each version are not comparable and it is no longer possible to develop an evidence base.

For all of these reasons the making of derivative works of any version of the Outcomes Star is not permitted. This means that you cannot modify any version of the Star in any way, or use the Star or ladder graphics, the text from the tool or the name of the tool in another application.

Triangle Consulting is working hard to make official versions of the Star available for all client groups. Find out the Outcomes Star versions that currently exist and others in development, or contact us on 020 7272 8765 or email info@triangleconsulting.co.uk if you would like to discuss collaborating with us to create a new version of the Outcomes Star™.

Licences allow integration with your systems

The terms of publication require you to have a licence from us if you wish to:

  • Use the Outcomes Star for commercial purposes including offering training and developing valuing models for the Star
  • Incorporate of the Star into your IT systems
  • Incorporate of the Star into your keywork paperwork
  • Translate the Star into other languages.

This enables us to control the quality of services available associated with the Outcomes Star and to generate income for the ongoing dissemination, support and improvement of the tools.

If you would like to find out more about purchasing a license please download this document. There's more information about translating the Outcomes Star on our International section.

If you are already using the Star in one of these ways without a license please let us know and we can issue a retrospective licence.