In 2002 St Mungo’s commissioned Triangle Consulting to develop a tool to measure distance travelled across all its projects ranging from street outreach to hostels to floating support.
The result was the St Mungo’s Star - the original version of the Outcomes Star. Liz Harper, Head of Performance describes how they have integrated the Star into all their key-work processes, the difficulties they have encountered on the way, and how the Star has ultimately helped improve their work in many unexpected ways:
We wanted to be able to evidence to the outside world that our projects were making a real difference to people’s lives and at that stage there weren’t any tools out there that would enable us to do this which is why we developed the Star.
The process of developing the tool went very smoothly and we were delighted with the result.
It has been the process of implementation that has proved more challenging than we anticipated.
Implementation was more challenging than we thought
We thought that staff would just pick up and run with it but now we realise that the Star needs to be fully integrated into our support planning materials and training. We have now adopted the recovery approach in all our work and the Star fits very well with this because it is about what people can do, not just their problems.
So we have integrated the Star into our new support planning approach at the same time.
We now make a clear link in our guidance and training between where someone is on the Star and the kind of interventions that are most appropriate.
For example, if someone is right at the beginning of the journey, they are not likely to engage in formal key-work so it is more appropriate to engage them informally when opportunities arise.
We stress the importance of giving a realistic score.
Before we delivered the new training staff would sometimes suggest a higher score because they didn’t want to seem too judgemental.
In the training we stress that it isn’t about judging someone it is about making sure that they get the kind of intervention that is going to work for them.
Another difficulty has been getting the right IT in place to record the Star data alongside all the other information we need.
We could use a stand-alone system for the Star but the danger is that we are then managing too many IT systems. For that reason we are persevering with an integrated IT system but at present we are not able to analyse the star data we have except for manually.
There have been unexpected benefits
But despite the difficulties the Star has had a very positive effect within St Mungo’s – particularly in the delivery of services – it has had an impact in all sorts of ways that we hadn’t anticipated.
Seeing the whole person
Because the Star shows all the key aspects of a person’s life it requires workers to think about the whole person, not just the immediate problems that person is experiencing – and that is an improvement straight away
Being a good listener
Using the Star well means asking open questions and listening carefully to what people say.
Some people struggled with this and this helped us to identify a clear training need.
It has also had an effect on our recruitment – we now select for good communications skills to a greater extent than we did before. So the Star has made clearer to us what the job of key-work is about and what skills are needed to do it well.
Understanding service users’ needs
The clear journey of change has given us a shared language for talking about client need – it has opened up lots of conversations at management level and helped us to consider and understand client need and how we respond to it.
It has helped us to be really clear about what the role of different projects is – where on the journey they take people in and where on the journey they are aiming to get people.
It helps us tailor our work to the individual by helping us to understand better where the individual is on their journey and what they need to take the next step.
Improving services
Although we don’t have an IT system to analyse the data we have worked with Triangle to look in depth at the Star data in four of our hostels alongside information about service user age, gender etc and the interventions they have received.
This produced some very helpful findings.
For example we discovered that women make less progress than men in mixed hostels.
This has confirmed and validated what we already suspected and as a result we are doing some work to look more closely at what women’s needs are.
We also learnt that many service users started to move backwards if they stayed in our hostels for longer than a year which has added an increased momentum to an existing project to ensure that there are clear move-on options within our larger hostel.
It’s a change management process
My advice to anyone who is thinking about using the Outcomes Star is to see the implementation as a change management process.
It is vital to communicate to key-workers how it will help them to do their job, and also that it will help the organisation as a whole to make its case to the outside world.
It is also vital to integrate the Star fully into key-work processes and training.
It has taken us a while to do all this but now we have we are really starting to see the benefits.