News

NIHR SSCR Annual Report

The NIHR School for Social Care Research's Annual Report 2009-2010 is now available online (pdf file, 3MB).

International Conference on Evidence Based Policy in Long-term Care 8-11 September 2010

Detailed information on sessions and speakers at this major London conference organised by the PSSRU is now on the conference website. The conference will provide a forum for exchanging the latest international evidence on key Long-Term Care policy topics such as how to organise, deliver, fund and regulate services.

Registration closes on 31 August.

Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit (ASCOT)

As part of the ONS Measuring Outcomes for Public Service Users project, the PSSRU has developed the Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit (ASCOT) to enable measurement from the users’ perspective of key social care outcomes such as cleanliness and comfort, good nutrition, control over daily life, social interaction and dignity.

It will assist commissioners in their move towards contracting adult social care services on the basis of accurately measured outcomes in order to provide better value for money. It will also assist commissioners, in partnership with service users, to find the best care services so that they can achieve their desired outcomes.

The toolkit was welcomed in the Guardian of 9 June as ‘a new measure that will shake up adult social care’.

Background to the toolkit and the measures themselves are available from the ASCOT web pages.

Measuring Outcomes for Public Service Users

On 7 June the Office of National Statistics launched the results of its three-year research programme Measuring Outcomes for Public Service Users (MOPSU), previously known as the Quality Measurement Framework (QMF). The MOPSU project consisted of three main work strands, all working towards the overall aims of

• more efficient and effective commissioning and procurement of services, placing the issues of quality and value for money at the heart of the decision-making process
• encouraging the use of ‘outcomes’ measures to assess the impact of services on their users, across the spectrum of providers
• examining the extent to which the third sector is involved in public service delivery and helping to alleviate barriers to entry to third sector organisations

PSSRU at Kent was one of the research teams commissioned, and three new PSSRU reports on this work are now available to download:

Discussion Paper 2696/2: Measuring the outcomes of care homes: final report (pdf, 122 pages, 1.38MB)
Discussion Paper 2699: Measuring the outcomes of low-level services: final report (pdf, 83 pages, 888KB)
Discussion Paper 2727: Measuring the outcomes of low-level services: annexes to final report (pdf, 74 pages, 960KB)
Discussion Paper 2713: Measuring the outcomes of information and advice services: final report (pdf, 90 pages, 849KB)