Background
The newly formatted CORC report was developed to help services and organisations get the most out of the data they submit to CORC. Northumbria Healthcare had recently restructured and reflect below on how the CORC report has contributed to their understanding of how the teams are working across the service.
Tackling the problems
The service had recognised that they needed to make a number of changes to outcome measurement, due to being part of CYP IAPT and expected to use a lot more outcome measures. They wanted to find a more suitable, easy to use measure to see if they were improving as a service and have more consistency throughout the service, but what was relevant to one team was not necessarily relevant to another. At the CORC Members' Forum, it was discussed that every clinician should be able to have the choice to use what measures they find appropriate, but this was not always easy in practice. Northumbria Healthcare wanted to understand better how to get paired outcomes, particularly when collecting a Time 1 record at assessment and trying to meet the requirement to collecting a Time 2 record within 4-8 months. They also wanted to understand better what constitutes a good time to record a Time 2 measurement.
Impact
- Staff found it really useful to see how the rest of CORC was doing, particularly the levels of paired outcomes
- The layout of the report and use of graphs helped the team to better understand the data collected
- The report emphasised that certain measures are not useful for certain teams, e.g. SDQ is not adequate for Northumbria's neuro-developmental team, as the service users symptoms don't improve as such, and the team should focus more on looking at parents' understanding of the condition
- Staff were engaged in discussing the presentation of information in the newly formatted report, and highlighted areas where further information would have been helpful
- Teams were able to recognise where there were low response rates and contributing factors to the low Time 2 data rate
- The team were able to agree on the continued use of Goals Based Outcomes across services, seeing them as useful
Key learning
The report is a useful tool for all staff to see, and encourages staff to get involved in discussing the areas they need to work on, how to go forward and what was beneficial. Northumbria would like to share learning with other services, as the service's paired outcome rate was 11%, compared to 38% for the rest of CORC.
How did CORC help?
Sally, CORC's Regional Improvement Support Officer, was available to talk Northumbria Healthcare through the report and support them to think about next steps.
Many thanks to Alexandra Plant for providing us with this case study.