Longer Term Outcomes and Service Excellence

In this pilot study, Broadway’s research team measured the longer term outcomes for clients after resettlement (after they had moved into their own homes). 26 clients who had been resettled from Broadway between one and four years ago completed questionnaires to help us find out:

• Do Broadway’s resettled clients keep their homes?
• How well do they manage with independent living?
• What is their quality of life?
• What is their experience of resettlement?
• How did Broadway help them and how could we help more?

Key findings:
• 96% say Broadway helped them make lasting positive changes to their lives
• 80% are in employment, voluntary work, training or education
• Three have bought their own homes
• Around three quarters have a high quality of life and are managing well, but a minority were struggling with some aspects of independent living.

Almost all respondents were very positive about Broadway:

‘I want to thank Broadway staff for helping me get my own flat and space. My life is going well and I am happy’

‘[Broadway has] given me confidence and a future’

The Keeping Homes research will be repeated on an annual basis to enable us to demonstrate the long term impact of our work.  In the meantime Broadway continues to improve the quality of the services provided to our clients.  To this end, one of our key funders, Supporting People, regularly inspect our services and grade us on quality in the following six key areas:

• Needs and Risk Assessment
• Support Planning
• Security, Health and Safety
• Protection from Abuse
• Fair Access, Diversity and Inclusion
• Complaints

They grade the service accordingly:

• A is excellent
• B is good practice
• C is minimum standard
• D is below minimum standard

Over the past year in order to improve the quality of our services Broadway has:

• Carried out service audits of all hostel and supported accommodation services in the period October 2007 to June 2008
• Updated all key policies and procedures to ensure they are effective and in line with Supporting People requirements
• Set up a series of Listening Lunches to consult clients on any policies and procedures which may affect them
• Carried out annual reviews of all client protection cases (abuse, harassment, domestic violence and anti-social behaviour)
• Produced a Diversity and Equality in Service Delivery Strategy 2008-10
• Compared the diversity of our clients against external data and set targets by service
• Held a Complaints Forum in June 2008 to involve clients in the annual review of complaints and to improve our learning from complaints

These improvements have helped to further improve our quality gradings from Supporting People.  Seven Broadway services have been reviewed in the past year and have received, almost exclusively, B and A gradings.  Broadway will continue to work towards achieving grade A in all objectives in all services.  In turn and in time we hope that this commitment to providing quality services will be reflected in our longer term impact research.  

To read the full report please click here