Leadership Board: First meeting - PHS - Monitoring and Evaluation Paper

Leadership Board: First meeting - PHS - Monitoring and Evaluation Paper

Title of item

Monitoring and Evaluation for Scotland’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy – Summary Paper

What decisions are required?

The Leadership Board is invited to:

• Agree that monitoring and evaluation of the Strategy should be progressed.
• Agree on the proposed theory-based approach for monitoring and evaluation as laid out in the PHS summary paper.
• Discuss and agree the recommended next steps for monitoring and evaluation proposed by PHS. These include exploration of which areas of the Strategy should be prioritised for evaluation, areas where existing evaluation can be used, and areas where new mechanisms for evaluation are required.
• Agree on the creation of a data and evidence group to progress work on behalf of the Leadership Board.

Lead

Jane Ford, Public Health Scotland

Background

Public Health Scotland (PHS) have developed an initial feasibility study of monitoring and evaluation of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy. PHS has carried out extensive research and engagement over several months to consider and recommend a set of next steps, now being presented to the Leadership Board for agreement.

Impact (including measurement of impact)

Monitoring and evaluation of the Strategy will be fundamental to understanding if the Strategy, and the actions laid out in the Delivery Plan and Workforce Action Plan, have made measurable and tangible changes to the mental health and wellbeing of the people of Scotland. This, in turn, will ensure the Government can be held to account for progress against the Strategy’s Vision and Outcomes. It is important to note that PHS’s paper mainly relates to the medium-to-long-term monitoring and evaluation of the Strategy’s outcomes. Developing and implementing this work in full is expected to span over several years.

Robust monitoring and evaluation of progress is also necessary to allow the Leadership Board to assess which interventions have been successful, where adjustments may need to be made, where there may be the potential to go further and where issues require resolution. This will be fundamental to ensuring the Leadership Board has access to the right information when taking decisions on forthcoming refreshes of the Delivery Plan. Progress updates on specific Delivery Plan actions will be a key part of this, and this reporting is immediately available. Paper LB(24)01-03 at this meeting presents the proposed format of that short-term reporting.

PHS has determined that evaluating progress towards outcomes across the entire Strategy is initially unfeasible due to its scale and complexity. Therefore, PHS recommends identifying specific areas for evaluation activity as part of a first phase.

One of the recommendations from PHS is the creation of a Data and Evidence Group to lead this work. It is proposed that this group would advise on the development of full monitoring and evaluation arrangements, including which areas of the Strategy should be prioritised for evaluation activity. This group would also consider how to draw together the outputs from monitoring and evaluation, and other data sources such as progress reporting on specific Delivery Plans, to ensure that the Leadership Board have access to the data it needs to inform its considerations going forward.

Links with Mental Health Policy

This work cuts across the totality work related to the Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy. The Strategy sets out Scottish Government and COSLA’s approach to transforming mental health in Scotland. PHS have engaged heavily with Scottish Government and COSLA officials while developing this work to understand where the priorities for specific policy areas lie, what evaluation is currently in place or expected to be in place in the near future, and where there are significant gaps in monitoring and evaluation that require intervention.

Associated Documents

PHS have produced a substantial (c. 120 page) technical report to support this paper, including details on methods, findings and evidence on why specific actions are being recommended rather than others. Leadership Board members are not expected to read this in full, however, the technical report is available by request. Please contact the Leadership Board Secretariat directly if you would like a copy.

Scottish Government Official

Rebecca MacPherson, Mental Health Directorate