Reflections on 'Engaging young people in routine outcome monitoring' training
Last month, I developed and delivered some training on engaging young people in routine outcome measures, on a service level. The aims of our training were, exploring what young people think about completing measures as a part of their therapy, how to consider a rights-based model throughout and to share suggestions for improving participation in services.
We did this by showing CORC’s own videos made by young people, exploring real life experiences of the use of ROMs and how it affected them, this was a powerful tool in showing the other side to outcome measures and some of the areas that need to be spoken about and co-designed with young people.
We wanted this training to be insightful and useful to those who wanted to start embedding participation in their service as well as, offer practical theoretical solutions to sharing data with young people. One of the biggest areas of improvement spoken about by young people, was how we share the data collected from the outcome measures. Young people feel confused and disheartened in their support when time is taken out to complete the measures, however often, no time is spent explaining the outcome. I hoped by sharing expertise on these topics, we could inspire and motivate practitioners in strengthening their approach to youth participation within services, furthermore, highlight young people’s rights to have a say and have their opinions given due weight regarding the measures they are asked to use.
I included activities to help trainees process and cement some of the learning, one of these in particular generated some great input; we used a breakout room where we asked trainees to reflect upon their practice as it currently was and what they would do next following this training content. Using a Jamboard (an online collaborative tool where you can feedback anonymously), trainees were asked to answer the question based on CORC’s Best Practice Framework.
In the framework, we cover four main themes when working with routine outcome measures and the standard services should be aiming for:
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Service user’s understanding of measures
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Communication with service users about measures
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Collaborative setting of goals and choice of measures
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Service users’ feedback on support
We received some great responses for considerations on what’s next for the practitioners who attended:
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For ‘service users understanding of measures’ - Team training for all on how to ensure the ROMs are meaningfully used was a strong idea that came out. This would also benefit practice even more if you were to include young people in the creation of the training.
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For ‘communication around ROMs with young people – Creating a summary for each ROM used, sharing insight with young people from the beginning and throughout on why and how you use the measures, was another strong idea from the session.
Whilst reflecting on the group’s feedback and the running of the training, I thought it would be useful in the future to add more practical ideas on the running of workshops with young people and to include some ideas on how you would go about setting up working groups or advisory groups with young people, especially in a mental health setting.
CORC will continue to offer training around engaging young people in routine outcome measurement, thank you to those who attended this first one, we gained useful insight for future training offers around this subject.
Hannah Brunskill, Engagement and Participation Officer