Report Strengths:
By reporting the breadth of routinely collected clinical outcomes in our Outcomes Report, St Patrick's Mental Health Services (SPMHS) demonstrates a willingness to constantly re-evaluate the efficacy of our clinical programmes and services in an open and transparent way. A detailed Service User Satisfaction Survey is well established in the full 2018 Outcomes Report, encompassing evaluation of all service delivery within SPMHS and reinforcing our commitment to service user-centred care and treatment.
The annual Outcomes Report has also provided valuable feedback to the staff who deliver services within SPMHS on the impact of their work. Their recruitment and ongoing education and training are underpinned by a philosophy which focuses on service users. The skills, talents and commitment of staff are reflected in the positive results within the 2018 Outcomes Report.
Report Challenges:
We continue in our efforts to expand the number of services included within the SPMHS Outcomes Report, but, as yet, we do not have all areas of service delivery included. With no other organisation in Ireland currently producing a comparable report, efforts to benchmark our results can remain very difficult. Changes to the outcome measures used have been implemented in order to best capture the efficacy of clinical programmes and services; this too can create challenges when comparing current results to previous reports. The clinical outcome results in the report cannot be attributed solely to the services or interventions being measured, and are not developed to the standard of randomised control trials. The relatively low Service User Satisfaction Survey response rate remains a significant challenge for SPMHS. The current content and structure of the survey is being reviewed, as well as the processes around how and when completion by service users is requested.