Pain Concern

Pain concern supports and informs people with pain, and those who care for them. This support is largely provided through a telephone helpline and online forum.

The challenge that Pain Concern faced was how to measure long-term impact (e.g. to social isolation) of a remote service.

ESS ran a tailored support session with the helpline supervisor, manager and volunteers.

Together, we created a logic model to show immediate impact and contribution to long-term outcomes.

Setting very short-term outcomes (which contribute to long-term outcomes) meant that typically outcomes could be achieved during calls.

Pain Concern then used the logic model to create an evaluation plan, where volunteer call handlers were at the forefront.

What difference did we make?

After our tailored support session, Pain Concern were able to revise their tools:

They moved away from gathering information about the quality of calls and customer satisfaction.

They moved towards collecting information relating to their outcomes.

Indicators were introduced which could be ticked off by call handlers during the call. They also created a comment section to capture feedback during the calls.

“The helpline logic model was key in helping us to redesign our feedback forms for both capturing the contacts’ and volunteers’ views.”

Pain concern

A couple of years later, Pain Concern received further support from us when their new manager Sam joined.

We supported Sam in evaluating Pain Concern’s helpline service, we did this by facilitating a tailored support session to review Pain Concern’s evaluation plan and design appropriate collection methods.

Together, we reviewed the indicators that had already been explored, and helped identify the natural points of contact when Sam and her team would be able to gather feedback. This led to ideas about the simple changes that could made to their contact log form (which they complete during calls) such as recording callers’ feelings of positivity and ability to take next steps.

Additionally, to help Sam understand each step on the evaluation pathway she then attended our ‘Let’s Evaluate!’ training programme.

“I really enjoyed the support session and found [the trainer] to have been super helpful and approachable. I came away feeling much more positive afterwards and knew what my next steps were.”

Sam, Pain Concern Manager

What did we learn?

If you run a remote service – it may be helpful to set immediate outcomes which you can achieve during a call.

Don’t worry about proving long-term outcomes – you can still show your contribution to the long-term outcomes via the short-term outcomes!

Revisiting Pain Concern allowed us to see that after the first tailored support session, they had a good foundation for their evaluation plan and had outcomes in place. But the second tailored support sessions meant that we were able to provide more structure for evidence collection methods and reassurance that they were on the right track!

See below for the case-studies that this story is based on:

Case Study: Pain Concern Helpline

This case study is about the steps Pain Concern took in order to capture the difference their telephone helpline makes for people living in chronic pain.

Case Study: Pain Concern

ESS worked with Pain Concern to help improve their helpline service. This case study is an example of an ESS evaluation principle: good evaluation should fit the way you work.

Our principles for good evaluation can help you to judge if you are happy with your evaluation. They are used within this story to highlight the principles that are being demonstrated.