Time Space Compassion - supporting people experiencing suicidal crisis: stories in practice - volume 1

8. Penumbra's outcomes mapping project

Taking time to understanding the impact of Time Space Compassion by building relationship, being clear and consistent, and making connections

Penumbra provides dedicated services to adults and young people who experience mental ill health. They do this through a wide range of community based mental health services. More recently, Penumbra have been exploring how to define and better understand what matters to the people they support.

"The voice of lived experience already shapes our processes and activities at Penumbra, so this project was about finding even better ways to put people at the heart of our work."

Our challenge

We believe that mental health recovery is possible for all and that supportive relationships are key to this, but we also operate in a world where the amount of work we do can be more highly valued than relationships. Penumbra are working to develop a set of meaningful measures that help us understand and do more on what matters for the people we support, at the same time as charting our progress towards the outcomes defined by funders and regulators. These measures, and our ways of collecting them, need to reflect our values and ways of working. For us that means simple, practical tools that support meaningful conversations and track our journey towards outcomes; developing and doing this with people, not to them; and working in trauma informed ways that deliver the time space and compassion people need for recovery.

Our response

We started by looking for ways to build on what's already in place – for us, this meant starting with I.ROC, a personal recovery measure and tool we use to help people identify and track their journey towards their personal outcomes, and our HOPE® framework for mental wellbeing. We then brought together an evaluation platform provider specialising in outcome focused evaluation, with people who have used our services and our practitioners. Our aim was to work together to shape what we would do next. Next, we shared stories and experiences about what positive outcomes really mean and what matters most. We used those stories to develop an outcomes map, which was then translated onto the platform provider's cloud based system. This gave us a practical and logical approach to capturing, tracking and reporting people's experience of what we do in real time. At a person and practitioner level, it helps people capture and track progress. At a strategic and service level, it helps us bring together data and evidence that we can use to ensure that our services work successfully towards both personal and our shared outcomes.

Learning from practice

Building relationship – By working together to: understand and share our experiences; the relationship between what we set out to do and how that makes people feel; as well as the impact all of that has for people in the short and longer term, we help create the trust we needed to learn and change things together. Being clear & consistent – people's lives and recovery journeys are complex. The systems we use to track impact need to help us work with that, rather than compound it. Simple cloud based systems that reduce admin, along with consistent approaches to providing support and prioritising human connection, can help support recovery, wellbeing and better outcomes for everyone involved. Making connections – offering time space and compassion; and collecting meaningful data can happen at the same time. The key is to identify the important questions and ask them in ways that serve the people we support, as well as their recovery.

Impact

We're still at an early stage with this work, but initial findings are that focusing on shared outcomes, combined with gathering evidence of our performance in a systematic and consistent way, can help us deliver the difference that matters most.

For more info on Penumbra visit their website