GEN117 Monitor, evaluate and improve processes for delivering health and wellbeing services to a population

Overview

This standard covers the monitoring, evaluation and improvement of processes for prioritising the delivery of health and wellbeing services for a population. The population is likely to be at regional or local level. It might include everyone in a geographical area who needs health and wellbeing services or it may be focused on the health and wellbeing services for a particular client group, such as children and adolescents, adults or the elderly. The planning of services is based on the identification of the needs of those whom they are designed to serve and is based on a number of principles. These include equity of provision through targeting resources at those most in need, participation of the population in identifying their needs, and evaluating the effectiveness of the means of meeting those needs. Practitioners need to keep an open mind and be alert to areas where needs may be changing or where current means of meeting needs are failing to serve the requirements of some section of the population. One of the key values in this workforce competence is the need to ensure that the population has the opportunity, and is enabled, to feed their views and concerns into the planning process. This standard applies to anyone who has the responsibility for undertaking service planning in a provider role to meet the health and wellbeing needs of a population. Users of this standard will need to ensure that practice reflects up to date information and policies. Version No 1

Knowledge and Understanding

You will need to know and understand:

1. how evaluation and review should be built into the planning of services to enable sufficient and relevant information to be collected
2. the value of different perspectives in evaluation and how they can be encouraged
3. the information which can be gained from referral patterns and processes
4. the ways in which a wide range of views have been incorporated in the past and how this may be adapted to your own situation
5. different forms of evaluation, when and where they are appropriate
6. how to implement different forms of evaluation validly and reliably
7. why it is difficult to make casual relationships in the area of promoting health and wellbeing and when this can be done
8. the time lags which there may be between intervention and when it has any effect
9. the other intervening factors which may counteract or support the promotion of health and wellbeing and how these can be quantified
10. the ways in which the health and wellbeing needs of populations are evidenced and how services can be evaluated against these indicators
11. how you can review the effectiveness of evaluations and improve practice within them and the purpose of doing this
12. how to present conclusions and recommendation to people so that they are likely to be influenced and change their practice

Performance Criteria

You must be able to do the following:

1. use service information to monitor and evaluate the extent to which services are meeting the criteria for their delivery
2. gather and analyse relevant data to identify trends and changes in the population's needs and the effectiveness of services in meeting these needs
3. establish the extent to which prioritisation criteria and referral protocols are targeting those most in need and identify ways in which matters could be improved
4. enable stakeholders to feed into the evaluation process and offer their views on how services could be improved for those who are currently using the services and for those whose needs are not currently being met
5. evaluate referral protocols and information from referrals to determine any problem areas
6. update and improve criteria and protocols in the light of changing needs, feedback on their use and changes in national strategies and policies
7. clarify concerns regarding the availability of resources and the extent to which they allow services to meet the needs of the population effectively and address these to those who need to know and may act upon them
8. communicate the results of the review process to relevant people at a time when they are able to make us of it

Additional Information

This National Occupational Standard was developed by Skills for Health. This standard replaced MH57. This standard links with the following dimension within the NHS Knowledge and Skills Framework (October 2004): Dimension: G5 Services and Project Management