Summary
– Few dispute the view that the principal challenge in health and social care is to deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively. The topic receives increasing attention in academia and the press. Commissioners of care are increasingly expected to ‘pay’ for outcomes, PROMs or results. The challenge is translating these good intentions into practice…
In late 2010, Walsall Council decided to transform its reablement service and implemented eABLE, a software solution that provides standardized base-line and outcome assessments and tracks all activity related to patients/service users.
This paper looks at the concept of Outcomes Management and how data is an invaluable tool in improving performance. Walsall’s success is well documented in various case studies. In this paper we looks at some of the data that helped Walsall improve productivity by over 30%. The key data relates to 160 reablement cases managed by 8 teams each consisting of 6 to 12 of staff.
The data suggested that the potential for service improvements are very real even taking significant variation in outcomes and resources invested by team in account. We recognize that this paper is based on a relatively small data set and some of the findings may be challenged for its statistical relevance. However, we believe that it is important to start the journey and begin investigating what makes for good performance, as well as what highperforming teams do differently from others.