Background: The objectives of improving effectiveness and efficiency require that we understand the impact of interventions but measuring
and monitoring outcomes in social care presents particular challenges.
Methods: The developing adult social care outcome toolkit (ASCOT) incorporates nine domains of outcome that are weighted to reflect
their relative importance using population preference weights. The full measure uses interview or observational techniques
to establish current and expected levels of need in each domain. The measure can be linked to routine indicators to provide
an indirect approach to monitoring the value of services in which we identify the potential value that could be delivered
by a service or intervention: capacity for benefit; and the degree to which that value is actually delivered through a measure
of quality.
Results and conclusions: While ongoing work is developing the measure, previous versions have proved reliable and been successfully applied across
client groups in a variety of contexts.
Discussion: The results suggest that the measure should provide a theoretically grounded method of reflecting the full value of social
care. Moreover, the capacity for benefit approach potentially provides a pragmatic basis for comparability—over time, between
changing systems and across different countries.
Presentation slides available from: http://www.bridgingknowledge.net/Presentations/Symp9_Netten.pdf