How do you measure friendship? Why public services need to show their worth

In our age of austerity, charities, private providers and public sector bodies need to demonstrate that what they do works

There’s nothing especially new about the care and support model known as Shared Lives. In fact, people have been opening their homes to disabled adults for at least 500 years. But in 2015 the time has come to prove its worth.

“We’re developing an outcomes tool that we hope to make available to the whole sector once it has been piloted,” says Alex Fox, chief executive of charity Shared Lives Plus. “It will record baseline referral data with six- or 12-month updates and we aim to aggregate the anonymised results nationally. We’re particularly interested in trying to capture things like friendship.”

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from Voluntary Sector Network | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1Pg4Wux