User perspectives on outcomes

Shaping Our Lives started as a research project in 1996 looking at service users' perspectives on outcomes. It was a response to service providers, politicians and academics placing an increasing emphasis on assessing support services in terms of their outcomes ie, their results.

Shaping Our Lives set out with the aim of developing the users’ perspective on outcomes.

The key findings of this initial project were:

users recognise the value of evaluating services in terms of their outcomes, but they see it as essential that users' views are primary in this and that it includes the subjective perspectives of individual users.
some users had difficulty with the idea of outcomes, but this tended to be where services were poor and the outcomes were difficult to define.
people receiving direct payments found it easier to define outcomes than users of traditional services.
some services lead to negative outcomes.
outcomes cannot be separated from the process of service delivery.
when users look at outcomes they look at their lives as a whole.

Click here for a copy of the Interim Report 1997 and click here for a copy of the Final Report 1998 of this project.

Contact us for a copy of ‘The Outcomes We Want and How We Can Achieve Them’ which sets out how we would like to address the issues raised by this work.

We are following up this work with four development projects to engage user in work on outcomes. Click here for details of our outcomes developments projects.

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