Alabaré run a large number of homelessness projects across the southeast and southwest of England, including around 150 bed spaces plus floating support and training and development projects. They work with a range of clients, including learning disabilities, mental health and young people. The outcomes star has relatively recently been rolled out across all the accommodation based projects and is due to be implemented across the organisation over the coming months. A number of initially resistant hearts and minds have been won over and implementation continues to be a learning process, as described here by senior operational manager Janet Herring:
The Star ticks a number of boxes
Our primary motivation for going in search of a tool was that we were pleased with what we seemed to be achieving in our projects but how do would we demonstrate it? Once we started using the Star, we realised its value in looking at goal setting with our clients, that it enabled people to put more goals in and to make support planning more meaningful. That was an incredibly valuable consequence of introducing the star, but the driver was evidence and external verification, including being able to complete the supporting people outcomes form; we wanted something that was meaningful to a service users and to be able to tell someone else are we were making a difference. For us, the outcomes star therefore answered quite a few conundrums.
There was considerable opposition at the start
A first step was to take both the outcomes star and another tool we were considering to the middle management team and present both with a recommendation to go with the star. At that time, half of the middle management team were vehemently against the star, some even describing it as a breach of human rights. However we did reach agreement to try it.
Service users really like the Star
At the evaluation of the pilot we found that a lot of people really like the star. It has gone down really well with our service users. For example we have one nine-bed service for women with complex needs. There, one of the women filled it out with her worker and then spent some time looking at her completed star and said:
"I see, my life is all jagged at the moment and I'm here because you are trying to help me be a more well-rounded person”.
Positive service user response won over management hearts and minds
As a result of such responses, those managers who did have initial concerns have since changed their minds. Indeed, because of contact with one project which absolutely loved it, one of the staunchest critics is now the star's foremost champion in the organisation. They have been open in recognising that their initial response was due to putting their own value based on to the star, not the clients. We find that once people do the star with clients, they come round to it. For instance, some of our staff had initial concerns around giving clients a "score”, but we emphasise the steps of the star and when people see the visual aspect of it and the way clients respond, they come around.
Internal training and integration of the Star went well at first
After the agreement to go ahead with the Star, we downloaded the Star training course available on
http://www.homelessoutcomes.org.uk/
and used that to run internal training with all staff. That went incredibly well and people seemed to really have a grasp of it. We then integrated the outcomes star into our ways of working with clients so it is completed within the first 28 days and at three-month review. It can then be completed again whenever the client and worker think it's appropriate but must be completed at the end, as the client is leaving the service. Our experience is that the first star is not always that accurate because the process of completing it and looking at areas of life are mixed up with the crisis that bought the person to us in the first place. The three-month reading is more realistic and onwards from there gives us a good picture of progress.
Some workers really “get it”, others don’t
However, what we have now found is that certain staff are brilliant at doing the star with clients and that others are not. In some projects, staff have entered the star data onto the number cruncher Excel spreadsheet and that has revealed a lack of consistency in the scoring, with some staff entering unrealistically high scores for service users even as they first arrive in the project, for example. As a result, we looked into what was actually happening and found that we have some real outcomes star champions and others who simply haven't grasped it at all. Some clients really, really latch onto it and others don't and we found a lot of this was around the key worker.
Staff need on-going discussion, checking and training
I realised that that we had been so pleased by the way that staff embraced the star during the training; we had not built in any mechanism for checking by line managers within supervision or ongoing discussion of the star to ensure consistency of use. We have now identified those staff that need further training in the star and are setting up systems to ensure that the star is integrated into supervision and team meetings and that there is a continual process of checking and ensuring it is understood and used consistently. For us the next steps are checking, auditing and embedding the star and once we have a good enough sample of sufficiently consistent data to be confident of what it says, we will analyse and report those results.
Our commissioners are fascinated by what we're doing with the outcomes star
For example in our review with Wiltshire county council they said they wanted to have distance travelled measures embedded. You can see their eyes shine a light up when we talk about the Star; it definitely gives us brownie points.
National indicators have now been agreed in all the areas we cover, with a different set of 35 indicators in different local authority areas. What we are finding is that these local area agreements also give us opportunities to talk about ways in which we are contributing that we might not otherwise have thought to raise, such as getting young people involved in volunteering. Because this links to a particular national indicator in one area, we can now show the contribution of this project.