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Welcome to the Framework for Measuring Impact

Measuring impact helps you to demonstrate the effectiveness of your practice, the efficiency of your service, and the degree of person centred care that you are providing. Being able to demonstrate each of these factors is central to delivering a quality service. But, for many, demonstrating such impact is a challenging and elusive task.

If you have used this website before and want to go straight to the measures click here.

This website has been developed by the Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professionals Research Unit at the University of Stirling in Scotland, UK, to guide allied health professionals, and others, in how to measure the impact of their clinical work in practice.  It is based on a thorough investigation of the factors that make the measurement of impact challenging in practice (see background). Having identified these factors we have endeavoured to find ways to support practitioners at each stage, so that these challenges do not become blocks to measurement in practice. The Framework can be used at both a service level or by individual clinicians who searching for tools and processes to help them measure what difference their service makes to peoples lives. The recently published NHSScotland Quality Strategy (2010) identifies person centred care, effectiveness and efficiency as three of its key drivers for improving patient care and health services.  And the Framework helps health professionals to select, use and report the findings of appropriate outcome measures in these three key areas, ensuring that services and clinicians are collecting outcome information that will demonstrate the impact of services in peoples’ lives, be useful to clinicians and services in considering quality improvements, and be in line with current health policy.

To get started we recommend that you click on the Start Here option, or the blue button above, which will guide you through the six key stages of using the Framework in practice.

We have also included an online Discussion Group and encourage clinicians to use this forum as a shared resource to exchange good practice relating to the measurement of impact and to seek information from other services who may already be doing just what you would like to.  

The Framework is a dynamic system and will evolve over time. Please don’t hesitate to Contact Us should you have any suggestions about future developments.