ESS Depute Director Diane Kennedy talks about how our A Stitch in Time? series of resources can be helpful to third sector organisations in Covid-19 times
A few years ago, ESS was commissioned to look at how to evaluate the third sector’s contribution towards the Reshaping Care for Older People agenda. The Stitch in Time? programme was about how the third sector contributed to ensuring a good quality of life and wellbeing for older people.
ESS drew heavily on the experience and evidence collected by our third sector practitioners. But we also made use of an excellent review of evidence produced by Health Scotland which looked at a range of different types of evidence and what it told us about the wellbeing needs of older people.
As a result of this combined evidence, our model identified six key outcomes that contribute towards older people’s’ quality of life and wellbeing, those outcomes were around:
- Ensuring the physical and social environment is age friendly
- Keeping/being more socially connected
- Staying positive and in control
- Keeping/ being more financially and materially secure
- Ensuring the systems works better for older people and carers
- Keeping/ being more healthy and active
It strikes me that, most of these are relevant to today’s crisis, not just for older people but for all of us and particularly for other vulnerable groups.
The third sector, along with their partners, is enabling people to keep well by providing emergency aid, helping people to access the support they need, keeping people motivated, connected, fit and healthy, as well as reaching out to and identifying the needs of particular groups and communities.
So, if you want to measure your impact might these materials help
- Indicator bank
- Evidence summaries (see links above)
- Case studies
They might need to be interpreted or adapted for your work. That’s fine, in fact it’s encouraged!
