Embedding evidence in practice
The Journey to Better Outcomes (Outcomes Journey) is a tool to assist you in decision making and help you create, share and use high quality evidence to deliver high quality services.
The Outcomes Journey is for everyone working with or on behalf of children, young people and families to achieve better outcomes.
The Outcomes Journey is intended to:
- Help you integrate the best research evidence with client experience and Practice expertise.
- Strengthen the evidence base for child, youth and family services by supporting you to document what works, for whom and under what circumstances.
The Outcomes Journey is made up of the following areas of focus:
- Identify Identify the service gap, need or opportunity that, if addressed, will lead to better outcomes
- Design Design the appropriate program or service, and the accompanying implementation and evaluation plan
- Implement Implement your program or service and monitor progress in partnership with clients and colleagues
- Evaluate Evaluate how and why a program or service is leading to outcomes (and if not, why not) and share this knowledge with clients, colleagues and community
- Reflect and review all the way through Reflect on client and practice experience and review data to improve your practice and build the evidence base
Guiding Principles
- Dynamic –This journey is not linear or a step by step process. Learning, refining and adapting are continuous.
- Participatory – This journey includes clients, communities and key stakeholders as active participants whose knowledge and experience is sought and integrated throughout.
- Multidimensional – ‘Evidence’ is more than literature and peer-reviewed journals; it includes practice expertise, client perspectives, cultural knowledge, evaluations and organisational learning.
Moving through the Outcomes Journey can feel messy! Trust in the process but adapt the tool to meet the needs of your particular client, program, organisation, community and cultural context.
How is it used?
You can enter the Outcomes Journey when and where is most relevant. Working alongside your clients and community, the tool offers guidance at key decision making points throughout a program or service cycle.
Additionally, you will find practical steps and advice depending on whether you are a practitioner working directly with children, young people or families, or a person working in a program, providing service design, management, evaluation or research.
- If you are a practitioner or program team member, use the Outcomes Journey to help you identify service gaps and key outcomes and design a service that best meets those needs.
- If you are a leader or manager the Outcomes Journey can help you create a culture where monitoring, review and continuous improvement are embedded in your organisation.
Look out for tools, resources and sector case studies to support your work.
References and Tools
There is a lot of information related to outcomes, practice and evidence available online and in journals. The Outcomes Journey aims to translate existing knowledge to make it useful for children, youth and family services. To this end, we have curated a range of resources to assist your work.
We hope you find the Outcomes Journey useful. We welcome your feedback and suggestions!