Policy and practice across the UK and beyond is committed to improving the lives of people who use services and unpaid carers. Over the past five to ten years there has been a particular concern to shift health and social care systems away from an exclusive focus on their own inputs, processes and outputs to give a more prominent focus to personal outcomes for people using services and unpaid carers. In this context the term personal outcomes is used to refer to both the impact and end results of services and supports on a persons life and more simply, what matters to people. The proposed project builds on a seven year programme of knowledge exchange and service improvement that has been led by two of the applicants (Dr Ailsa Cook and Dr Emma Miller) and funded by the Joint Improvement Team in Scotland. This programme, known as Talking Points, has involved work with more than 130 organisations to support the development of outcomes focussed practice. A key finding emerging from the Talking Points programme is that limited capacity and skills in the analysis of qualitative and quantitative personal outcomes information within health and social care organisations constitutes a significant barrier to effective outcomes focussed project. Furthermore, this issue is exacerbated by the predominance of performance cultures that prioritise consistency, comparability and measurability of information over meaning. Over the past year 15 partner organisations have worked together to develop this proposal for funding from the ESRC. The partner organisations have all been involved in the Talking Points programme and include the following academic, practice and national stakeholder partners: University of Edinburgh (host institution), University of Strathclyde, University of Swansea Angus Council, Bridgend County Borough Council, City of Edinburgh Council, East renfrewshire Health and Care Partnership, Moray Health and Social Care Partnership, Penumbra, Stirling Council, VOCAL (Voice of Carers Across Lothian) Joint Improvement Team, Community Care Benchmarking Network, The ALLIANCE, Social Services Inspection Agency. The proposed project involves both collaborative action research and knowledge exchange elements. Specifically the academic team will support each of the practice partners to engage in an action research project focussed on the analysis and use of personal outcomes data routinely collected through assessment and review processes within their organisations. Co-ordination and collaboration between these projects will be primarily achieved through the convention of three 'data retreats' two day workshops where project partners work together to develop capacity and skills, exchange knowledge and reflect on the process. The contribution of national stakeholder partners will ensure that the findings of this project are effectively disseminated to and implemented within a wider constituency of health and social care organisations. This will be achieved through support for a range of knowledge exchange processes, including events, dissemination of materials and staff time to work with other organisations not directly involved in the project to implement the findings in their own practice. Engagement with these partners, all of whom are actively involved in shaping policy, will ensure that the project findings influence national policy, in particular in relation to the development of national outcome performance reporting frameworks. In these ways it is anticipated that the proposed project will bring significant benefits not only to partner and provider organisations, but to the wider health and social care system. The short term impacts of the project will be systematically evaluated through a process of contribution analysis. Findings from this contribution analysis and the project as a whole will be widely disseminated, including to academic audiences.

This project will be a collaboration with community partners to co-design and evaluate new approaches to consultation. Consultation, the engagement of communities in public service decision making becoming an increasingly important part of local and regional life, with moves to help communities be more active and connected to their wider environment. This encouragement of ground up activity reflects a groundswell of new community, friends and special interests groups forming across the UK. It is also recognised by national government with legislation such as the Localism Bill (2011) laying out a sweeping agenda for empowering communities, e.g. giving residents the power to instigate local referendums on any local issue. Public bodies have always been involved in consultation with their communities and there is a strong desire for this to increase in the future and to support communities in playing a larger, more active role in society. This need (and desire) for more consultation coincides in dramatic reductions of Council funding. In the last 3 months one of the public sector partner departments we work with has been reduced from 22 to 4 people. Clearly new consultation practices are needed to accommodate both the opportunity presented by the demand for more consultation and a quite different funding landscape. Leapfrog will help create and evaluate these new models, working initially with test beds in Lancashire and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and then more broadly across the UK. Lancashire has closely packed overlapping communities that are hard to engage, e.g. with low rates of English literacy. The Highlands and Islands communities are very geographically dispersed and isolated and are strongly motivated to innovate by the hardships they face in terms of communications and access. Working across these two test-beds will stress test our new consultation approaches and help make them more robust when applied in other parts of the UK. We will develop these new approaches through a process of co-design. This involves collaboration with communities and public sector partners where all parties play an active role in the creative process (Cruickshank et al 2013). Communities will engage in a co-design process that results in a range of new consultation tools that specifically meet their local needs. For us a tool is something that, with skill, can be used to make wonderful, diverse, creative things (just like a real physical tool). In this proposal we are developing tools to help all people create their own amazing consultation processes. Our consultation tools will be used by communities directly, they will also be exchanged with other communities who will be encouraged to appropriate and adapt these tools to fit their own needs. Tools could be physical, digitally downloaded and printed or entirely digital in nature. We will use these tools to develop toolboxes containing a themed set of tools (e.g. consultation without writing, for groups with low levels of English literacy). We will produce at least 50 of each of the 5 toolboxes we produce. We will seed these toolboxes in at least 80 communities and public sector bodies across the UK. Underpinning all our actions, from co-design to innovation in local consultation to widely distributed toolboxes will be a series of new evaluation frameworks. These will be used to understand the real value and impact of the new tools. With strong guidance from Gareth Williams, our applied ethicist, these evaluation frameworks will be designed to be unobtrusive but also to examine activities in terms that make sense and are seen as valuable to communities. Rather than evaluation being something that is 'done to' communities this will also be a collaborative, mutually beneficial shared process. Cruickshank, Coupe and Hennessy, 'Co-Design: Fundamental Issues And Guidelines For Designers: Beyond the Castle Case Study', Swedish Design Research Journal no 2, 2013. page 4