1. Introduction
1.1 We intend this guide to assist councils, working with key strategic partners, to evaluate their performance on the strategic commissioning of care and wider supports for adults, children and young people. It should also assist councils to evaluate joint commissioning with partner agencies. We want this guide to be helpful, but like all of our self-evaluation products, its use is not mandatory.
1.2 We have designed the guide for use in all sectors of social work. It is not prescriptive - it is for councils to decide how to use the material. However, the guide contains key questions to ask when evaluating performance on strategic commissioning.
1.3 Five councils helped in the production and testing of the guide and several others gave us comments on drafts. We also consulted a wide range of other agencies, including representatives of provider organisations.
1.4 In the overview section, we set out what we mean by strategic commissioning, describe the main activities involved, give some general guidance and identify some features of good practice.
1.5 To prepare this guide we have used commissioning material produced by a number of other agencies. Appendix 1 contains a list of these references. We have carried out an equality impact assessment on the guide.
1.6 The guide provides the resources to examine strategic commissioning in depth. We suggest four themes for evaluation, and within each of these, essential features and prompts for the types of questions you may want to ask to explore each theme.
1.7 You should read this guide in conjunction with the SWIA performance improvement model contained in the guide to Supported Self-Evaluation: Building Excellent Social Work Services.
We published this in February 2009, and it is available at www.swia.gov.uk.
1.8 You will find a diagram of the SWIA performance improvement model on the next page. Commissioning is part of evaluation area 8 (resources and capacity building). It links closely to several of the other evaluation areas, in particular:
- 1, 2 and 4 (outcomes and impact);
- 5 (delivery of key processes);
- 6 (policy and service development, planning and performance management); and
- 9 (leadership).
1.9 SWIA is producing separate guides on leadership and performance management. Some parts of these will be relevant when you are evaluating your performance on strategic commissioning. The guides will be available at www.swia.gov.uk.
Performance IMPROVEMENT Model ( PIM)
