Outcome Reporting

There are many ways of reporting on outcomes in Paua. Some different ways are described here.

Using Client Outcomes

This is the simplest way to report on outcomes. It reports on simple achieved/unachieved rather than quantitative scores.

Client outcomes are a set of checkboxes in their own tab amongst all the other client tabs. They are user defined in Preferences and may or may not be grouped into Outcome Groups depending on how they have been set up for the particular agency.

For the purposes of a demonstration lets assume that funders require a breakdown of how many clients have had an improvement in their situation thanks to the agency intervention.

Setting up the Outcome

Under Preferences Outcomes create a new outcome called The agency helped improve my situation

This outcome will now appear on the outcomes tab on the client pages.

Fill in the outcomes

As part of the normal capture of client data make sure that the workers always record the outcome The agency helped improve my situation with a tick if the client says the agency has helped.

Reporting on the outcome

Run a client search to retrieve all the clients for whom you want to measure the outcome. This could be all clients from a certain programme or all clients in a certain date range for example.

Go to Client Reports and select Stats Breakdown.

On the next screen under Breakdown By select Outcome.

You will get a list of how many clients achieved this outcome out of the total number of selected clients.

Tip

You can have as many outcomes as you like but try to be as specific as possible to ensure that a yes/no ticked/unticked status makes sense.

Using Client Assessments

Client Assessments are a more quantitate way of assessing a client’s progress.

Setting up the Assessment Forms

You can learn how to set up Client Assessments at Client Assessments.

Entering the responses

Once the assessment forms are designed it is important to have a standard workflow as to when the forms are answered by clients.

The simplest case is to record one form shortly after the client is activated and then another prior to exit. Then when running the analysis you can see how much improvement in scores there has been across the various questions.

Analysing the results

In the same way as with the client outcomes, running the analysis starts by selecting the cohort of clients that you are interested in. Then you select Client Reports and then Assessment Statistics.

You then get to choose which of possibly several assessment forms you want to analyse. Having selected the form you are interested in you have a choice of different reports on the same form.

Standard Report

The standard report shows each question from the form down the left hand side and in multiple columns to the right it shows the average score for this question across all the selected clients for this assessment.

Note

The number of columns will depend on how many times the form has been answered by the clients. If the form has only been answered once then there will only be one column. If the form has been answered by some clients three times then there will be three columns.

It is important to realise that the number of columns represents the maximum number of times the form has been answered by any client. For instance one client may have had four assessments whereas everyone else has only had two. This will mean that there will be four columns but the last two will only contain the responses for one client.

Clicking the button Show answer count will show how many answers have gone to make up the numbers and therefore how statistically valid they are.

Individual Client Totals

This report shows the average of each client’s responses for each time the assessment is given. ie. one line per client.

All Responses

This report shows all responses for all clients as a large grid/spreadsheet. It is too detailed as a report on general trends but can be useful as a drill-down to more detail than the other reports which average out the answers.

Score Breakdowns

This report simply shows how many clients picked each response for all the questions. For example how many answered ‘7’ for question 1 etc.

Improvements

This report shows how many clients showed improvement over successive assessments for each question.

Using Goals

Goals are user defined and can be marked as achieved or partially achieved. Thos can be another way of measuring outcomes.

Entering the data

Make sure that clients have the relevant goals set and that they are are marked as achieved or not during the client relationship.

Analysing the results

Again you need to select the cohort of clients that you are interested in.

Then choose Client Reports and Goals Breakdown.

This will show you for each Goal Type specified, how many clients had goals set and how many were achieved, partially achieved and unachieved.

Note

In summary - there are many ways of measuring client progress and outcomes and it is up to you to decide which is best for your agency.

The most important thing is to think through what you want to measure and design your Outcomes, Assessment Forms or Goals appropriately and have a disciplined workflow to ensure that the relevant data is captured.

Other Methods

There are many Standard Forms in Paua that can also help measure outcomes.

  • ADOM - Alcohol and Drugs Outcome Measurement

  • HoNOS - Health Of the Nation Outcome Scale

  • HonOSCA - Health of the nation outcome scale for children and adolescents

  • HoNOS65+ - Health of the nation outcomes scale for over 65s

  • SACS - Substance and Choices Scale

  • Mast-G - Michigan Alcohol Screening Test

  • SWEMWBS - Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale

  • KESSLER 10 - Kessler psychological distress scale

  • WHOQOL - World Health Organisation Quality of Life Scale

  • EPDS - Edinburgh Post Natal Depression Scale