Evaluating the Beyond Programme: improving the health and life chances of children and young people in Cheshire and Merseyside
CORC is happy to share the findings of our systematic evaluation of the Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care Board’s Children and Young People’s Children’s Transformation Programme: ‘Beyond’.
Beyond, hosted by Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, is a transformation programme that aims to support the NHS Long Term Plan commitments but has widened the scope of delivery to ensure a Population Health focus across key priority areas: Healthy Weight and Obesity, Respiratory, Emotional Wellbeing and Mental Health, Learning Difficulties, Disabilities and Autism, Diabetes, Epilepsy, and Oral Health.
Beyond aims to listen to the voices of children and young people, to respond to their needs, and to transform their services, outcomes and life chances through integrated work across the partnership. Taking a partnership approach, the programme’s focus has been co-produced, and a “shift left” is key to its work – a shift to increase focus on integrated early intervention and prevention work that address wider determinants of health and social care.
The CORC team worked with partners in Cheshire and Merseyside to identify, evaluate and share learning on what is working well in the design and delivery of the Beyond programme and capture any elements for improvement. We took a mixed methods approach. A co-constructed theory of change was also created which supported the evaluation.
Three main areas of the programme's progress were:
- Creating a programme through which people work and learn together
- Looking at the big picture for children and young people, and working together to prioritise their health
- Positive improvements for children, young people and parents due to activities being delivered as planned
One strength of the programme is the priority and focus on children and young people, and the mobilisation of resources to address the challenges they face.
Some key recommendations were developed for consideration as the programme moves forward, for example:
- To explore how to evidence the impact the programme has on children’s lives overall and over time.
- The importance of continuing to emphasise, maintain and develop multi-agency working and approaches
- Developing a stronger online presence, to raise the profile of the programme among cross-sector partners and showcase the work
- Further developing approaches to co-production, building on a growing culture of engaging children, young people and parents and carers
- To develop an outcome and measurement framework
- To continue to develop ways to strengthen insight by looking across different data sources
You can read more about the strengths, challenges and suggestions from the evaluation in the easy read summary and full report, which you can access here.
Catherine Williams, Programme Manager of the Beyond CYP Transformation Programme has advised that:
Additionally Catherine fed back on her experience on working together with CORC on this work:
You can download these reports here:
Beyond Programme evaluation report
Beyond evaluation: easy read summary