Quality Checkers/ Quality Health Checkers – an audit is planned

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Wed, 09/29/2010 - 22:12

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social valueIn June I completed my Social Return on Investment (SROI) course and qualification, but to become a full SROI accredited practitioner I need to prepare an audit of a service using the methodology.

It will probably take between 20 and 30 days’ work, over a period of around 6 months, because of the sheer number of stakeholders I need to talk to, and the work involved collating all of their responses.
An SROI assessment demonstrates what the organisation, the buyer and the public are getting for their money. It is a comprehensive process for assessing the value of the service to the people that matter, the stakeholders (stakeholders clearly include recipients of the service, but also those paying for it, regulators, policy makers and others). It assigns a value to the benefit received (using a rigorous process to ensure this is a fair estimate), and explains how the service contributes to this value; for example, if other services or activities contribute to the same outcome then it’s worked out on a percentage basis (often an estimate by two or more people).
SROI assessments are usually either audits of an existing service observing what it has already achieved; or forecasts of what a service will achieve.
What is Quality Checkers?
I’ve been tremendously lucky. I worked with a charity a couple of years ago, on the “from Grant to Sustainable Funding” programme, who provide a number of advocacy services for people with Learning Disabilities (LD).
They were happy to see me again, and suggested that I assess their Quality Checkers programme and forecast the benefits of their Quality Health Checkers programme, which means I’ll do both an audit and a forecast.
The Quality Checkers is an adjunct to the usual management and regulator quality checks of a service – as well as auditing tangibles (health and safety, annual reviews, staff ratios), user opinion counts; but as anyone knows who has worked with vulnerable people, they aren’t inclined to reveal what they really think to us “normal” people.
Quality Checkers is a team of people with LD, paid to perform the audits, who are not only able to see the service from the user point of view, but also because they are peers of the service users/ people being supported, they get the real experience, warts and all. This means that a service provider (whether placing people in supported housing, providing care workers, or whatever aspect of the service) can find out what really affects the user experience, and we hope do something about it.
As well as audits, Quality Checkers trains new groups of Quality Checkers to provide their own local audit services.
 

Preparing to interview stakeholders

The key to the success of the SROI assessment is that the value of a service isn’t determined by the service provider, nor simply by one person’s opinion, but is the sum total (and sanity check) of a fairly large number of stakeholders.
The service themselves will feel that they are doing everything right, and may put an artificially high value on the service they bring. The commissioner will tend to only see the benefits that relate to their own other possible expenses or compliance with regulations. A wide range of opinions may uncover benefits that these two “professional” stakeholders may not have thought about.
But to talk with stakeholders, I need to identify the key ones and then get introductions.
 

Workshop with staff

I started with a workshop with the Quality Checkers staff, themselves people with LD. 
We quickly identified that I’d need to include the people who are supported, the people who pay for the audit, also families of quality checkers to describe how their new professional skills affected their lives, organisations providing care, regulators and policy makers on what difference it made to them, and so on. I’m videoing what I can to make the final report much more accessible.
Then Kathy wrote letters of introduction to the first batch of identified stakeholders.
We were both stunned by the enthusiastic responses.
2 weeks since starting I’ve had the chance to talk to a number of organisations which have purchased the Quality Checkers audit. It’s very instructive!  They identify benefits that they get which the Quality Checkers themselves hadn’t thought of. They can’t praise the Quality Checker concept, or the things that they have been able to do with this extra information, highly enough.
Some key benefits are already emerging:
  • peer-to-peer conversations mean they get real views of what the service is like to
  • receive
  • supported
  • people seeing “someone like them” in paid employment as a skilled professional  raises expectations and
  • morale
  • organisations
  • report users are much more engaged with setting corporate objectives – especially where they themselves train Quality Checkers, these people get a much wider experience which leads to a much greater
  • contribution
  • there’s
  • learning for staff - users can have an
  • opinion
  • turning
  • aspirational corporate objectives ("giving users a voice") into real tangible results

What does this mean for SROI?

When I first talked to Skills for People, they thought they were not able to measure what they did or what they achieved.
It’s amazing how much people know. It’s amazing how much they don’t know that they know, that a good facilitator can identify and bring out.
There’s a big debate going on on the internet about producing a SROI-lite, a cut-down version of the full SROI process. I’m now convinced that it isn’t necessary, but that since every organisation and service produces outputs and outcomes, they can all be measured. If they don’t record what they do, then it just takes a bit longer for an independent person to find the figures.
 

 

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So you want a web site?

Submitted by Hugo_Minney on Sun, 05/20/2012 - 15:35

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We can create a web site for youYou've enjoyed reading The Social Return Company's web site (this site), and you want a site like this.  You run a small business or voluntary organisation, and you like the way that TSRC appears high up in Google searches, also B12 deficiency support group (www.b12d.org) also appears.  You want to know how you can do it?  Read on . . .