What do parents and carers think about routine outcome measures and their use? A focus group study of CAMHS attenders

Abstract

Currently service user involvement in routine outcomes monitoring has been minimal, particularly in Children's services. There needs to be a more sustained effort to involve service users because of the valuable information that they could provide for service development and improvement. Focus groups were conducted with service users, including parents, carers and young people from a London CAMHS. Their views were elicited on routine outcomes monitoring in general, three specific approaches and suggestions about what else might be important to capture when measuring outcomes. The focus groups raised a number of issues pertinent to routine outcomes monitoring in general, including the reliability of answers, the need for the measures to reflect more than just a tick-box approach and that different people will have different perspectives. Analysis also focused on feedback about the three specific measures discussed. It is important that service users are involved in the process of outcome measurement, from the development of measures, to their application in therapeutic encounters and in service development. Outcome monitoring needs to become a more collaborative process in order that services are measuring what service users think is important, as most would agree that a service should deliver the outcomes that its users want to see.

Patient-reported outcomes in child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS): Use of idiographic and standardized measures

“…There are many reasons why GBOs may be more acceptable to service users and practitioners (Weisz et al, 2011), focussing as they do on the particular concerns of the individual and removing the sense of tick box exercise that both practitioners and service users are concerned about (Moran et al, 2012). It may be that a focus on GBOs, and in particular tracking progress across sessions, can be a powerful way to improve effectiveness and efficiency (Weisz et al, 2011).…”

A qualitative exploration of attitudes towards the use of outcome measures in child and adolescent mental health services

“…It has also been argued that measures can be depersonalising and unrepresentative by attempting to objectively measure work that is often subjective in nature (Batty, et al, 2013;Moran, Kelesidi, Guglani, Davidson, & Ford, 2011;Norman, Dean, Hansford, & Ford, 2014;Wolpert, Curtis-Tyler, & Edbrooke-Childs, 2014).…”

Routine outcome monitoring of evidence-based parenting programmes: indications of effectiveness in a community context

“…During the five-year period, clinic managers ceased APQ measurement to focus on child outcome data, in line with recommendations by CORC (Wolpert, 2013) to limit the amount of information collected, and in the interests of feasibility and attaining a complete data set. The use of ideographic and standardised measures ties in with preferences expressed by service-users in a London CAMHS clinic, for a raft of measures including personalised GBOs (Moran et al, 2012). As a standardised measure, the SDQ has been described by service users as the most acceptable out of a range of ROM measures (Merry et al, 2004) and as covering a lot of important issues and being easy to understand (Moran et al, 2012).…”

“…The use of ideographic and standardised measures ties in with preferences expressed by service-users in a London CAMHS clinic, for a raft of measures including personalised GBOs (Moran et al, 2012). As a standardised measure, the SDQ has been described by service users as the most acceptable out of a range of ROM measures (Merry et al, 2004) and as covering a lot of important issues and being easy to understand (Moran et al, 2012). In this case the SDQ was completed by parents/carers alone, but researchers (Goodman et al, 2000), practitioners (Norman et al, 2013) and parent/carers (Moran et al, 2012) have emphasised the advantages of including information from a variety of sources including clinicians and young people, to triangulate outcomes information.…”