Outcome Dictionaries

All of the work that we do tries to relate the day to day issues that people present to services with the vast range of outcome frameworks and strategies developed by Government. We do this by spending time with people that use services and the people that provide services to try and find out what are the most common things people want help and support with.

We support organisations to try and get an understanding of all things that are going on in people’s lives. Many of the things that people want help and support with are dependent on other issues which might mean services are better off working together to support someone. Generally, we have found that there are a number of common issues that  people present to all services and some issues that are specific to individual services. 

Because of the complexity of issues that people are seeking help with we have taken an approach that encourages services to try and assess three areas of a person’s life. Their personal circumstances (wider determinants), their lifestyle and their status factors (clinical conditions and skills). Taking this holistic approach helps to give a perspective on how much a single service can help someone and where services need to wrap around the individual.

When we began defining issues, and tracing where they sit in outcome frameworks, we started with the Life Course. By focussing on Starting Well, Developing Well, Living Well, Working Well and Ageing Well we had enough to cover most people that visited services looking for support. As we began to work with more specialised services we realised this approach needed to be refined for different sectors.

All of the Dictionaries are available for you to use. Each dictionary sets out the most common issues that people present to services. The definitions are extracted from the wide policy environment and include the reason why they are useful issues to measure and what data you should collect. Each issue also provides links through to outcome frameworks and strategies. All of these Dictionaries are live and as the policy environment changes we update the links.

The data dictionaries are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

If you would like further information on the dictionaries, and how they can support your work please email info@insideoutcomes.co.uk.