DEVELOPMENT OF TOOLS TO MEASURE SERVICE USER AND CARER SATISFACTION WITH SINGLE SHARED ASSESSMENT
CHAPTER ELEVEN RECOMMENDATIONS
1. Further specific consultation on the toolkit is recommended.
11.1 Valuable advice about making the toolkit accessible to people from minority ethnic communities was obtained from a colleague with many years experience of working with local community groups and one pilot site was chosen to maximise the likelihood that people from ethnic minority communities would be involved in the sample. However, no one from an ethnic minority community took part in the pilot.
11.2 Whilst members of the Local Development Groups were drawn from across the spectrum of community care users, no one who identified themselves as having experience of HIV/Aids was a member of any of the groups.
2. It is recommended that a further pilot should be undertaken with the following features which differ from the pilot already conducted:
11.3
the pilot should be based in only one or 2 Joint Future Partnership areas
independent evaluators should be identified and briefed
discussion should be held with assessors about how they will explain the assessment process to service users and carers
assessors would leave information with all service users and carers at the end of their SSA about the possibility of being contacted about the pilot
assessors would notify the evaluators of agreed details of service users and carers promptly at the conclusion of their SSA
consideration should be given to the use of assessors' photographs to aid service users' recall of the assessment process
evaluators would identify the characteristics of the desired sample for the pilot
evaluators would call service users and carers selected for the sample to arrange a discussion about participation in the pilot: evaluators would ensure that this happened very quickly after notification from assessors to minimize the risk of service users forgetting the content of their assessment meetings
evaluators would speak to assessors about the communication issues in relation to the service user they were working with and any other advice/information (e.g. information about the assessment process to help confirm for the service user what the evaluator wished to discuss with them)
focus groups should be considered as an additional method for user and carer feedback
evaluators would discuss with service users and carers the purpose of the pilot, establish consent to participation, agree what method of evaluation the service user and carer wished to use (e.g. questionnaire or discussion or focus group participation) and make arrangements for this choice to be actioned
the questionnaire and/or to the briefing of interviewers would be reviewed to eliminate what may appear to service users to be repetitive questions
11.4 The above adjustments to the original pilot would critically:
take away from assessors the responsibility of obtaining consent from service users, thereby reducing a previous barrier to user and carer consent to participation in a pilot
give assessors better information about the purpose of a further pilot, thereby increasing the likelihood of their willingness to co-operate with pilot procedures, especially as these are much less onerous than in the original pilot.
3. A system for analysing the information collected with the Toolkit should be specified, and its use in the production of an outcome based performance indicator should be demonstrated.
11.5 As part of the further piloting process it will be essential to demonstrate how the Toolkit can be used to monitor and improve practice. At this stage considerable progress has been made in methods for gathering information. Methods of processing, analysing and presenting this information should address the needs of partnership agencies responsible for conducting SSA and those of the Joint Future Unit, the national body charged with monitoring progress and standards across Scotland. Issues to be explored include: the potential for scoring the responses of service users; ways of capturing qualitative findings in summary form; appropriate data processing systems; validity, in relation to the numbers of service users included in local evaluations; and the format to be used for presenting results. Consultation with partnership agencies and the Joint Future Unit is an essential part of this development process.
4. In implementing this element of the evaluation of SSA, it would be vital to ensure that staff of Joint Future Partnerships are fully briefed and engaged with the process.
11.6 In particular, all assessors need to be clear about the vital role they have in providing information to evaluators to enable contact with service users and carers soon after their SSA is completed and in helping evaluators prepare for evaluation meetings with individual service users. It is recommended that all assessors should attend a familiarisation session to ensure they are fully informed on these matters.
5. To ensure this element of the evaluation of SSA implementation is demonstrably transparent and objective, it is recommended that independent evaluators are commissioned by Joint Future Partnerships to use the Toolkit to provide feedback to Partnerships on user and carer satisfaction with their SSAs.
11.7 With introductory training, individuals involved with service users and carers organisations, Health Councils, Community Care Forums and advocacy organisations could take on interviewing and other roles. It will be essential to pay a fee and expenses for this work.
6. The development of the Toolkit needs to be linked in with other initiatives which are currently being developed in related areas: e.g. e-care.