Plan how you are going to evaluate user involvement at the start of the project. Given the length of time it takes to establish effective user groups, it is important to develop both long and short-term objectives to ensure success can be measured at all stages. For example, in the first year of involvement the objectives might relate more to the process – recruiting, training and supporting users to get the to the point where they have the skills, confidence and information they need to start influencing decisions.
Once the group is established, there maybe more medium-term objectives around making changes to services. The ultimate objective ‘to improve services and make them more user-centred’ may take years to achieve. Therefore any success measures used as a means of evaluating involvement need to reflect the natural evolution and gradual steps in the process.
There will be milestones in all the process of planning and establishing and supporting the group to get to the position where it’s functioning effectively – that’s a big chunk of work…so you need success criteria around planning and management and then success criteria around the user group leading and starting work…
Carol Cottingham, NHS Lincolnshire Head of Long Term Conditions
Here are some things to bear in mind when you are planning your evaluation.
- Be clear about what you hope to get from evaluating it.
- Sit service users and healthcare professionals down together, at the outset, to agree what the project is aiming to achieve in the long-term and in the short-term.
- When it’s agreed what you are aiming to achieve, decide what methods you will use to measure it.
- Gather as many perspectives as you can – ask users how they want to be involved in the evaluation, what role they want to play, and how they would like to feed in?
- Design the process to ensure lessons from the evaluation are relevant and can be made easily accessible to those who need to understand and implement them.
- Plan when you’re going to do your evaluation. It’s a good idea to start asking yourself some of the questions in this section whilst your project is ongoing so you can make necessary changes along the way. You should also plan a full evaluation at the end of the project so you can look back and see what’s been achieved.