Evaluating your case management

Your organization will probably need a system to evaluate its case management system. If it falls to you to establish a system, consider the following:

Who wants to know? It will be a lot simpler if the evaluation is primarily internal for you to improve your effectiveness. The simplest approach is to make it an item in a staff meeting where people can discuss the weaknesses and glitches in the way you presently manage cases, and then decide on any changes that need to be made. Your first step is often to fix the things that frustrate people most.

The next level up of complexity is to compare your actual outcome with the case plan goals to performance indicators. This reports what you achieved, and may be adequate for reporting purposes. As a system, it isn't necessarily ideal because it is easy to manipulate. Case managers can achieve more of their goals and indicators simply by making them less ambitious. Put another way, If you want to know what was actually achieved, you also have to evaluate the goals and indicators.

Another approach is to make a list of all stakeholders (not just staff) and get feedback from them all. This will give you a wider range of inputs and illuminate other ways of improving what you do.

In some cases, you will be asked to provide statistical information. This has two main uses:

1. It makes your part of the organization look impressively industrious.
2. It may be useful for accounting purposes, for example comparing cost of inputs with the benefits of outputs.