Who is using our approach?

We are delighted to be working with Age Scotland to support the evaluation of their Dementia Awareness Training. This programme of training has been jointly funded by the Life Changes Trust and the Robertson Trust and builds on previous courses delivered by Age Scotland.

We are working with ARC North West Coast, a research collaborative to improve outcomes for patients and the public through collaboration, working by bringing together academics, health and social care providers, members of the public, universities and local authorities.

We are supporting them to articulate and track the impact of this work.

Matter of Focus is delighted to be the evaluation partner for a significant investment from the Life Changes Trust, which has an ambition to make Scotland a place where people with dementia can flourish. We are working alongside the lead partners, Age Scotland, University of Edinburgh and Queen Margaret University, leading the evaluation process and supporting the team, their partners and persons living with dementia to use OutNav to evaluate their work.

CanChild is an academic network based within the School of Rehabilitation Science at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. CanChild focus their research efforts on children and youth with disabilities and their families, and they strive to innovate and share knowledge and research in an accessible way for families and service providers.

We are working with the CanChild Knowledge Translation (KT) group in four areas of their work to help researchers and project teams to understand, evidence and showcase the impact of their work.

Cunning Consulting (in Canada) offer organisational development, evaluation and research services with social services and Indigenous and Métis Communities. They have been working with the Matter of Focus framework for a while, and find it particularly important and useful when working with vulnerable, marginalized communities. They are using OutNav to support this work and are exploring it for a potential project focusing on a modular, food sustainability centre.

We are working with the Data-Driven Innovation Hub at the University of Edinburgh to undertake a data systems analysis and review of current pathways related to the concept of “frailty” in each of the six Health and Social Care Partnerships (HSCPs) in the Edinburgh and South East Scotland (ESES) region. The identification and management of “frailty” has been identified as an initial regional priority by the Health and Social Care element of the DDI Programme (HSC DDI) and its partners. We are engaging with a variety of stakeholders from across the region to explore practitioner perspectives, opportunities and barriers for frailty data.

We are working with East Lothian Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) to build expertise and capability in OutNav with a view to the longer term roll-out of the system. Following an outcome mapping process at HSCP strategic level, it was agreed that designated teams within the Partnership test and further develop three maps at a project level. The areas identified for tailored mapping development were:

• Implementing and scaling innovation and change
• Participation and engagement for improvement
• Supporting people towards personal outcomes

In 2018 we worked with Edinburgh Community Health Forum to develop a robust and sustainable monitoring framework that enables them to learn, improve the tell the story of the difference the work of the forum makes. They are now using OutNav to continually track their progress.

In 2019 we started rolling out the approach with several of their member organisations to develop a collective approach to evidencing the contribution of community health organisations to reducing health inequalities in Edinburgh. These organisations are:

Engender is Scotland’s feminist policy and advocacy organisation. We are working with Engender to map and develop a strategic overview of how their diverse projects and activity streams influence policy and make a difference to the realisation of women’s rights.

We are working with Fife Voluntary Action (FVA), who are the Third Sector Interface for Fife. We are the evaluation partners for a new project called ‘From Struggle to Strength’, which will support people with lived experience of poverty or trauma because of poor mental health and/or unemployment to grow the voice of experience in both shaping and delivering services in Fife. The work will be developed through supported volunteering in co-design of policy and services as well as increasing capacity for mental health peer support across Fife. Our four phase evaluation will be completed over two years.

Future Pathways offers help and support to people who were abused or neglected as children while they were living in care in Scotland. We have been working with Future Pathways as a learning partner since early 2018. We worked with them to map their contribution to outcomes and use OutNav to track their progress. We also carried out a scoping study for them, engaging with their registrants and staff to understand how well the service is working, what can be improved as well as the difference they make. Future Pathways continue to use OutNav to underpin their embedded evaluation processes. For more detail about this work, please watch our Evaluation Stories webinar – A new approach to trauma-informed working.

Includem is a youth support charity that works with young people to help them transform their lives. We are working with Includem to strengthen their understanding of how their work contributes to improving outcomes for young people. Together, we will map their activities to outcomes and work on a data audit to streamline how they get feedback on progress, so that they can continually learn and improve as well as tell a robust story of the difference they make.

Life Sciences Hub Wales are a body of the Welsh Government. They work closely with health, social care, industry and academia to accelerate the development and adoption of innovative solutions for better health and wellbeing in communities.

They are using OutNav to help them understand the impact and value of the activities they deliver, and to develop organisational objectives and recommendations for their work.

Since Scotland became the first devolved country in the world to choose to incorporate the UNCRC (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child) into law in March 2021, many organisations have been considering and preparing the ground for the changes that this will bring. To contribute to cohesion and readiness for these changes, Matter of Focus is working with the Observatory of Children’s Human Rights Scotland and Public Health Scotland to develop a Theory of Change for implementation, supported by the Scottish Government. The project will involve a range of people invested in this work, including children and young people themselves, to collectively articulate how and why they think change will happen, creating a framework against which we can track progress towards outcomes.

Since autumn 2020 we have been working closely with Midlothian Health and Social Care Partnership to help them tell the story of the difference they make to the people of Midlothian. This work has been over two phases, with the first focusing on mapping and evaluating work in relation to strategic commissioning, frailty work and the Number 11 service. Now in phase two we are working with new service areas, including unpaid carers and learning disability and autism, to explore their work in a way which is consistent with a strategic level outcome map for the Partnership. Working in this way is highly innovative but challenging, and our shared learning on how best to use OutNav at partnership level has been considerable.

As part of the national Detect Cancer Early Programme the NHS Lothian team is looking at how to reduce inequalities in cancer detection for people with learning disabilities and women from ethnic minority groups. We are working with the NHS Lothian Detect Cancer Early team to track their progress towards these outcomes.

We are supporting the evaluation of 14 projects funded by the Scottish Government to support the implementation of the Carers Act. The projects are being carried out by NHS Boards and are piloting approaches to improving the involvement of unpaid carers in hospital discharge. Matter of Focus is supporting the projects to run their own evaluations using OutNav, as well as drawing together learning across the projects.

We are working with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde to help them evaluate the introduction of new Peer Support Workers roles into five Community Mental Health Teams within Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership. We will use a variety of sources of evidence to explore the role and its impact and support the collaborative development of a robust outcome map for future self-evaluation.

NHS Lothian House of Care is focused on working across the health and social care system to encourage and enable more person centred and preventative approaches. We have worked with them to map the contribution of different people in the system to achieving this. They are using OutNav to evaluate the specific work they are doing with GP practices and across the health and social care system.

We are working with Lothian Minority Ethnic Health Inclusion Service to develop an outcome focused evaluation framework that they can use to tell a robust story about the contribution of their work to reducing health inequalities for people from BME communities, asylum seekers and refugees.

Penumbra is a significant Mental Health Charity in Scotland. Our work with Penumbra involves working closely with four impact and evaluation leads, taking a strategic organisational approach to internal evaluation. We developed a core outcome map with input from people in receipt of services and practitioners which is being successfully applied in a range of service types and projects with the Impact and Evaluation Leads being coached and mentored in their approach by Matter of Focus.

We are working with the Programme Board for Personal Assistants and other people with an interest in the provision of Personal Assistants within social care to develop a high level outcome map. This map will be used to inform the development and evaluation of the future work activities of the Programme Board.

We have created an evaluation framework and supporting data collection for this Global Challenges Research Fund project across the Universities of Edinburgh (led by Prof. Kay Tisdall), Cape Town, Rio de Janeirio, Bethlehem, and Swaziland. The project investigates participation for very young children in fragile environments. It will engage relevant stakeholders and share learning.

Our work will help create one or more outcome maps to ensure the project is impactful and that data is collected consistently to demonstrate its contribution to change.

The Scotland Reducing Gambling Harm project, run by the ALLIANCE, is a three year programme to ensure strategic responses are informed by the voice of people who have lived experience of gambling harms. Matter of Focus will be the evaluation partner for this work, working alongside the team to ensure that robust evaluation is built in from the start and to support continued learning and improvement.

We worked with Edinburgh Napier University and some community Artists to help understand the impact of the Seven Kingdoms project in Wester Hailes. They used OutNav to think how they would work with the local community during the lockdown and to document how they engaged with local people to communicate what mattered to them about their neighbourhood to City planners.

Scotland’s National Arts & Early Years organisation, Starcatchers is using OutNav to track progress of their Creative Kin programme for kinship carers and children. They have an ambition to spread this learning and use the approach across all of their programmes and projects to understand and demonstrate the difference they make to the lives of young children age 0-5 and the adults who care for them.

Technology Enabled Care (TEC) is defined as “where outcomes for individuals in home or community settings are improved through the application of technology as an integral part of quality, cost effective care and support”.

The Transforming Local Systems Pathfinder Programme is supporting four partnership areas to redesign services with a focus on better use of technology. In the process the team are piloting several pioneering approaches to programme management, service delivery and service design.

We are supporting programme team to take a developmental approach to the evaluation of this work at three different levels to understand:

They will be using OutNav to work coherently and efficiently across the different levels of the evaluation.

Matter of Focus is the evaluation partner for the Care Inspectorate Professional Development Award. Now in its second year, the Award is delivered by the Care Inspectorate to their own inspectors as well as staff in other organisations. We are working with the programme team to deliver an evaluation of their work to-date as and to develop a framework for continuing evaluation in OutNav.

We worked with the Citadel Youth Centre to help them track the progress of their innovative families project, which targets vulnerable families through a universal approach. They used OutNav to demonstrate the effectiveness of their work with parents to the Big Lottery Fund.

The Scottish Government’s Children and Young People Improvement Collaborative (CYPIC) have been using OutNav to evaluate their contribution to improving outcomes for children and young people in Scotland since 2018. They are using the system to evaluate the impact of time limited interventions, and to reflect on and continually advance their ongoing improvement work.

Clackmannanshire and Stirling Health and Social Care Partnership are using OutNav to evaluate the implementation of Neighbourhood Care in Stirling. The team started working with Matter of Focus to map their outcomes in 2018 and have been reporting using OutNav since then. If you would like to find out more, please see our recent Evaluation stories webinar.

The Developing Evidence Enriched Practice (DEEP) programme is based in Swansea University. By building bridges between policy, research, practice and people, DEEP applies diverse research in policy and practice development to organisations and systems in social work and social care.

We worked with DEEP to help build an outcome focused framework that they can use to evaluate their progress towards intended outcomes for people providing and using social care services in Wales.

We worked with the University of East Anglia to support their involvement with the Compassionate Communities Project. They are using OutNav to track the impact of this community project to open up conversations about end of life.

We are delighted to be working with East Renfrewshire Health and Social Care Partnership as they implement peer support approaches within their mental health and addictions service. We will be working alongside the partnership and intensively for 2020 supporting the services to continually learn from the peer support test of change and to embed learning more widely.

We worked with the Edinburgh & Lothians Health Foundation to develop an outcome map and build a framework to capture the learning from their Green Health Prescribing project.

Edinburgh Long Term Conditions Service provides support to people living at home with a long term condition. We have worked with them to map how their service contributes to improving outcomes for people. Three of the teams are using OutNav to learn, improve and monitor progress.

We have been working alongside the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children and the University of Edinburgh with the first global pathfinder city who have pledge to end violence against children – Valenzuela in the Philippines. We worked with the multi-stakeholder partnership to map how all the different stands of work will combine to help with their mission.

We worked with Health Technology Wales to help them map and track their strategic, national approach to the identification, appraisal and adoption of new health technologies into health and care settings across NHS Wales. They are using OutNav to help understand how their recommendations are put into practice to improve patient outcomes.

We have worked with teams within the ihub in Healthcare Improvement Scotland to test our software, OutNav, and help them develop a more co-ordinated approach to outcome monitoring, particularly for complex programmes of work. This has helped us understand more about how clients might use the different functionality of OutNav to share learning and good evaluation practice across larger organisations.

Launched in New Delhi in November 2014, the Know Violence in Childhood Global Learning Initiative was established by multilateral institutions, non-governmental organisations and funding agencies concerned about the global impact of violence in childhood and the lack of investment in effective violence prevention strategies.

We worked with Know Violence on an evaluation of the outcomes they achieved, and to develop a framework for embedding and extending outcomes through the work of the Global Partnership to end Violence Against Children.

Matter of Focus worked in close collaboration with the Life Changes Trust Advisory Group to understand its impact – on volunteer Advisors themselves, the Life Changes Trust and the wider community of young people with care experience. The Life Changes Trust Advisory Group brings together young people who have all experienced care at some point in their lives and who contribute to a range of work both internal and external to the Trust, including co-producing individual grants programmes supporting young people with care experience to take steps towards their personal aspirations. We worked in partnership with media co-op in this work. Read our report here.

Obesity Action Scotland provide clinical leadership and independent advocacy on preventing and reducing overweight and obesity in Scotland. We are supporting them to create an outcome framework and evaluation tools to track their contribution. They will be using OutNav to track their progress and evidence what difference they make.

We supported Police Scotland to build capacity to make better use of qualitative data for learning, improvement and performance management, running training for their analysts in qualitative data analysis for service improvement.

Public Health Reform is a partnership between Scottish Government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA). We worked with them to develop an outcomes framework that shows how the work of the Public Health Reform Programme will contribute to improving population health in Scotland, alongside other actors.

Reeltime Music aims to bring about a positive change in the lives of disadvantaged young people. They do this through the provision of affordable recording and rehearsal services; workshops and training; volunteering; and partnership projects. We worked with them to set up and implement a robust monitoring and evaluation framework across the organisation that links their activities to their outcomes.

Scottish Book Trust is a national charity that believes books, reading and writing have the power to change lives. We worked with them to help understand how they can work with outcomes, strategically and for specific programmes. We also helped them plan to build capacity for evaluation across the organisation.

Matter of Focus worked with SSSC and a wide range of stakeholders to co-produce an outcome map that captures the contribution Personal Assistants make to outcomes for the people they support. This map is used as a training and engagement tool to raise the profile of the work of Personal Assistants, supporting good conversations about how support can and should be delivered.

Scottish Women’s Aid (SWA) is the lead organisation in Scotland working towards the prevention of domestic abuse. In 2020/21 Scottish Women’s Aid piloted a webchat service providing direct support to children and young people experiencing domestic abuse. Matter of Focus worked with them to produce a Highlights Report, drawing together evaluative evidence gathered by Scottish Women’s Aid between November 2020 and April 2021, highlighting key points of learning and impact.

We worked with the Tasting Change project, funded by the Aspiring Communities Fund and delivered by a partnership in Wester Hailes, to develop a robust monitoring and evaluation framework for the project.

Our work with the Thistle Foundation has helped them to map how the work of the whole organisation contributes to improving outcomes for the people and communities they work. They are using our OutNav to help them systematically evidence key aspects of their work including training and funded projects.

We conducted an impact study of the Global Kids Online (GKO) research programme for the London School of Economics and UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti, using the OutNav approach. The Matter of Focus team, assisted by Alexandra Ipince from UNICEF Innocenti, collated existing evidence and feedback and interviewed key stakeholders to capture information on the impacts of the project over the last three years. Read the case study.