@Te Pou
@Te Pou is a blog with news and opinion pieces from Te Pou staff. You can click on an author's name in the right hand column to read all posts by that person, or use the archive and tags to find news by date or topic. Why not join the conversation and let us know what you think? Your comments are welcome on all @Te Pou posts.
Workforce the key to using information well
Published: 10 May 2012 by Robyn Shearer
Te Pou has a long history in outcomes measurement, development and, most importantly, the utility of good information to make a positive difference in people’s lives.
National outcomes forum
Published: 10 May 2012 by Richard Woodcock
One of Te Pou's key responsibilities is to provide sector leadership which supports the collection, use and understanding of mental health information and outcomes.
Building responsiveness
Published: 15 March 2012 by Emma Wood
Building responsiveness to service user needs is an ongoing activity for many organisations.
Working with you
Published: 15 March 2012 by Robyn Shearer
Last year Te Pou made changes to the way it works with organisations on workforce and service development.
Outcomes training in Christchurch
Published: 27 February 2012 by Mark Smith
Te Pou provided a number of training sessions in Christchurch over the week of 13-17 February.
Outcome dialogues
Published: 17 January 2012 by Mark Smith
Imagine an advocate for outcome measurement (known as OM), an outcome measurement sceptic (Thomas - as in doubting) and an outcome measurement rejecter (Humbug) having a series of earnest dialogues about outcome measurement in mental health: how might their dialogues go?
Outcomes training
Published: 22 November 2011 by Mark Smith
New Zealand is fortunate to have a number of dedicated and expert mental health outcome trainers across our various district health boards. These trainers provide training to their own clinicians in outcome measurement.
An outcome worth having: The dilemma of perspective
Published: 18 November 2011 by Mark Smith
What is an outcome worth having in mental health and who should decide what it is? Stupid question you may well say. However, it seems to me this question goes to the heart of what is important in our mental health services.
Outcomes training feedback
Published: 09 November 2011 by Mark Smith
Te Pou has recently provided a number of outcome training workshops. I thought it might be of interest to comment on some of this work.
How clinical information tells a story
Published: 26 September 2011 by Mark Smith
Some people think information is all about numbers and graphs, tables and statistics. While data is usually in this form information actually shows the meaning of data; it does this by telling a story.
Values-based information
Published: 01 August 2011 by Mark Smith
Information can seem a dry and boring subject; all about numbers and graphs and statistics. However, I think this is to confuse data with information. Information is about data which has meaning and the reason it has meaning is that it resonates with people’s values in some way. What information we chose to collect and how we decide to use it will depend on people’s values.
Long-term outcomes
Published: 01 July 2011 by Mark Smith
While we expect and understand why politicians have a short-term perspective, we hope and expect clinicians will have a longer perspective, beyond three years at any rate. Unfortunately sometimes clinicians can also be struck by 'short-termitis'. Focusing on the long-term outcomes for service users can be a useful antidote to this short-term perspective.
The grit in the shell
Published: 01 June 2011 by Mark Smith
The grit is information and the shell is the mental health services. The organism is the soft people part of those services. We all hope for the arrival of pearls.
Information dictionary
Published: 01 May 2011 by Mark Smith
This is a very selective and idiosyncratic information dictionary, offered with tongue firmly in my cheek. I compiled it for no better reason than that it connects many initiatives presently underway in information, with a large dollop of attempted humour.
Emotional intelligence and information
Published: 01 April 2011 by Mark Smith
I was challenged recently to ‘put more humanity’ into the outcomes information we put out to the sector. I confess that I was puzzled about how to do this for quite a while and even strictly whether it was really needed at all. After all, I mused, aren’t we appealing to people’s reason rather than their emotions? Don’t we want to have people change their practice because they see the evidence rather than simply feel an intuition?
Stages of change and information
Published: 01 March 2011 by Mark Smith
Working with information can be frustrating. Not everyone seems to ‘get’ information and quite a few people actively resist its appeal. Sometimes in a fit of self-righteous despair it’s easy to start blaming things and people for this apparent lack of interest in outcomes and information. Generally blaming people really isn’t helpful. A better way is to try and understand why some people are immune to the pleasures of information.
Prompting good service
Published: 01 February 2011 by Mark Smith
Recently, I had the good fortune to provide outcomes training to a group of clinicians who wanted to become trainers for other clinicians in outcome measurement. I found the experience strangely motivating due in no small part to the challenging questions and discussion, which all flowed quite freely (indeed some questions weren’t easy to answer at all and others were left for future research discoveries).
The tortoise and the hare
Published: 18 January 2011 by Mark Smith
We all know the fable of the race between the tortoise and the hare. The tortoise – against all the odds – wins the race by persevering and not giving up. The hare easily takes the early lead but decides to have a nap midway and while he sleeps the tortoise overtakes him and wins the race. There is obviously a moral to this story and the moral has had a number of interpretations. My own preferred interpretation – and hence connection to information – is to see perseverance and humility as the keys to understanding the fable.
Relating to outcomes
Published: 17 December 2010 by Mark Smith
This column is about relationships. I want to suggest that there has been a change in the past few years in the way most people in mental health services relate to the concept of outcomes measurement. The changes haven’t been dramatic but they do indicate a shift in attitude. Notice the emphasis is on the concept rather than the application of outcome measurement; I’ll have more to say about that distinction later.
Nudging choices towards better outcomes
Published: 03 December 2010 by Mark Smith
In a recent book ‘Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness’ Thaler and Sunstein (2008) make a good argument for helping people to make better decisions about their own health (amongst other things) by nudging their choices in a certain direction.
The problem with unintended consequences
Published: 26 October 2010 by Mark Smith
When we make aggregated information available about KPIs or aggregated outcomes we have an expectation of what we hope will happen as a result of people seeing that information. Not unreasonably, most of those expectations centre on people improving their performance or, in the case of outcomes, starting to collect them. These expectations can broadly be seen as intended consequences. There are – however – a great many unintended consequences involved when we make information available. While unintended consequences can be both positive and negative, the ones which interest us mostly are of the negative type.
What's different about outcome information?
Published: 30 September 2010 by Mark Smith
There is, to say the least, a lot of information in mental health services. While which bits of information are important and which aren’t is a matter for debate, I feel confident in claiming that outcome information is in the front rank in terms of its importance.
Common resistances to using outcome measurement
Published: 13 August 2010 by Mark Smith
I have the good fortune to visit many district health boards. These visits usually involve some kind of training presentation in outcome information use to clinicians, managers and leaders of various kinds. By outcome information it should be understood I refer to the three mandated outcome measures in New Zealand: namely HoNOS, HoNOSCA and HoNOS 65+ (I’ll call these ‘the tools’). In many ways these presentations provide a barometer of the current acceptance by these groups of outcome measurement in their services.
Information Latin (not ancient Greek)
Published: 21 July 2010 by Mark Smith
There was a time when much of the civilised world either used or aspired to use Latin. Through a combination of factors Latin became the de facto language for science, theology and much else besides. It bestrode the world like a colossus. Long before the unravelling of Europe in the twentieth century it provided a common currency and identity for much of Europe. Then, like some retreating tide, it disappeared from public life and was only discoverable in small pools of discourse and enquiry. This column briefly shines a light on Latin’s rise and fall in order to show interesting parallels with information.
The necessity for realism
Published: 15 June 2010 by Mark Smith
I have a confession to make: I sometimes get dispirited in trying to implement information and outcome measurement. I sometimes feel a sense of futility about it all. Yet when I do feel a sense of futility, it is realism which gets me through. A healthy dose of realism is often the best medicine I find.
The 'mirror model' of information
Published: 13 May 2010 by Mark Smith
This column is partly tongue in cheek; but only partly. The 'mirror model' of information is quite simple to grasp: it is whether, as health professionals, we can look ourselves in the mirror when we provide information to service users and know that we have provided the most useful, updated and relevant information that we can to help them with their recovery. My guess is that many people find it hard to look in the mirror on this matter at the moment.
Is our information person centred?
Published: 10 April 2010 by Mark Smith
Person-centred information is information which respects the unique personhood of each individual. This may sound like jargon, but such a phrase does have implications for practice. This column will explore what a person-centred approach to information might look like and indicate some of the tensions such an approach could mean for our current information work.
Developing an information use checklist for community
Published: 11 March 2010 by Mark Smith
What information do we absolutely need to be collecting and using in mental health services? Most DHBs and NGOs already have a reasonably good idea of what information they should be collecting. Less clear is what information they need to be using. Less clear still is what information clinicians need to be using. This column is focused on a checklist for clinicians and information use.
Inputs, outputs and outcomes
Published: 12 February 2010 by Mark Smith
This column is not yet another justification for using outcomes in mental health services. Frankly I think the case for demonstrating the use of outcomes within mental health services has been well made already. This column, by contrast, is more interested in the relationship - or lack of relationship - between inputs, outputs and outcomes.
What astronomy can teach us about information use
Published: 19 January 2010 by Mark Smith
I am interested in Astronomy. From the first years I can remember, I found the stars fascinating. In another life, with better mathematical physics skills, I would have loved to work in that area. Those who do work in that area are – in so many ways – like the explorers of earlier centuries on earth: pioneers of new lands and discoveries.
Christmas magic
Published: 09 December 2009 by Mark Smith
The Christmas Carol – Dickens’ immortal rendering of the Christmas story in narrative form – has much to tell us about the way information is being treated in New Zealand.
What is the best way of using outcome information ethically?
Published: 10 November 2009 by Mark Smith
This column is premised on the assumption that there are ethical issues involved in using information. There may be people who do not accept that there are ethical issues involved in using information. This column is not for them. I will not attempt to provide a justification (here) for why I think using information involves a range of ethical issues. Suffice to say, I think everything we do is ethical and hence using information is also necessarily ethical.
Is discriminating on the basis of performance acceptable?
Published: 06 October 2009 by Mark Smith
Generally in today’s liberal democracies we strive not to discriminate between people on the basis of things which they can’t change or have little hope of changing such as their ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. This has not always been the case. For a long time it was seen as perfectly acceptable to discriminate between people on the basis of these, and other, attributes which they couldn’t change. For most people these changes in current practice would indicate some moral progress in the world.
Promoting an outcomes culture in New Zealand's mental health services
Published: 17 September 2009 by Mark Smith
New Zealand – like many other countries – has been actively working on developing an outcomes culture within its mental health services for the past few years. As I will indicate later this commendable objective has not made all the gains we might have wanted. I will signal in this article how we might reignite the outcomes project and refocus our endeavours on promoting an outcomes culture within New Zealand once again.
How not to use information
Published: 10 August 2009 by Mark Smith
This column will focus on how not to use mental health information. A funny topic you may think, given that this column habitually focuses on the need to use information but perhaps we have simply had it all wrong. Perhaps, instead, we should heed the message of the silent majority that information is there not to be used.
Thinking outside the information paradigm
Published: 07 July 2009 by Mark Smith
In this month’s column I want to discuss information which doesn’t fit our current information paradigm. I want to make a case for being more inclusive and accepting of information which doesn’t fit our current paradigm since – I will argue – that makes our information more comprehensive, diverse and hence robust.
What information do clinicians really, really want?
Published: 09 June 2009 by Mark Smith
The truth is I don’t know what information clinicians really, really want. Sometimes I wonder if clinicians know what information they really, really want. So this piece is based on anecdotal guess work, conversations with clinicians and my own rather biased views on what clinicians really, really need.
The best reason for emphasising outcomes
Published: 19 May 2009 by Mark Smith
We collect outcomes under PRIMHD (programme for the integration of mental health data). Eventually the PRIMHD data should enable us to generate useful and interesting reports to feed back to services. This is good in that, up to now, clinicians collecting outcome data have received little if anything back. Not surprisingly clinicians question the point of collecting such information when it doesn’t seem to have any use.
Therapeutic interventions and information
Published: 30 March 2009 by Mark Smith
Mental Health Information can sometimes seem a dry subject. Partly this is because it seems to be focused so much on collecting information and not on actually using it. Using information is where it’s at - and that is anything but dry and uninteresting.
Primary uses of mental health information
Published: 13 March 2009 by Mark Smith
In this column I want to discuss the primary use of mental health information as a balance to the dominant paradigm of secondary use. The primary use of mental health information is designed to help a particular individual with their recovery and health. The secondary use is designed to aggregate information to support quality initiatives, research and monitoring of trends and patterns statistically over time. While the secondary uses of information is important the primary reason for collecting and using mental health information must always be seen as central.
Information ownership
Published: 13 February 2009 by Mark Smith
In this month's pulse I want to discuss the related concepts of information ownership and attribution and why they sometimes get conflated in people's thinking, the dangers of that conflation and how that conflation can best be avoided.
The first edition of Information Pulse
Published: 14 January 2009 by Mark Smith
Welcome to the very first edition of Information Pulse. This month the focus is on the reporting of information. Reporting is the way in which we present information. It is a vital part of the information jigsaw but one where the pulse is currently quite weak. Indeed, there are claims from the hinterland that the pulse cannot be found at all, or at best is very weak.
