6 February 2024 | Blog | By Richa Mitra, SASP Implementation Manager
At Support After Suicide Partnership, we want to help suicide bereavement services shout about the amazing, lifesaving work they do, every single day.
So we’ve created a new monitoring and evaluation toolkit, informed by services’ experiences across the country.
The aim is to provide services with resources to make their evaluation experiences easier and provide guidance for everyday, routine monitoring.
Why have we created the toolkit?
Suicide bereavement support services need to continue, and sustainability is so important. The only way to ensure sustainability is through monitoring and evaluation; through effective reporting that showcases the incredible work taking place across the country.
Evaluations help services demonstrate impact and illustrate that continued funding is imperative and lifesaving.
Last year, we reached out to all commissioned suicide bereavement support services across the country, with a survey on evaluations. The survey explored questions around experiences that services have had when undertaking evaluations, and we heard back from many services from all over the country.
The in-depth insights into what aspects of evaluations services found difficult and what barriers might currently exist fed directly into the creation of this toolkit.
The detailed responses we got back allowed us to understand how services are using evaluations, what the general understanding of both monitoring as well as evaluation was, and crucially what we could do to help.
What’s included?
We understand that capacity and time to invest in activities such as evaluations, can be an ongoing barrier, so we hope that the resources within this toolkit will make it quicker and easier for services to undertake these activities, freeing up time for what they do best – supporting people who have been affected or bereaved by suicide.
We will be adding more resources as time goes on, and the current resources we have launched with are as follows:
- Glossary of terms
- Introduction document to monitoring & evaluation
- Data checklist
- Timeline template
- Service user outcome questionnaires
- Service user experience questionnaires
- Guidance on privacy: adherence to the Data Protection Act and General Data Protection Regulation
- Case study template
We intend to keep the toolkit live – resources will continuously be updated as they get used and ongoing feedback is obtained. Since launching, we have already added the case study template and data protection resource into the toolkit.
Where should I start?
The best place to start with the toolkit would be the introduction document and the webinar we ran for SASP members for the launch of the toolkit. This can be found here and will provide a foundation for both monitoring and evaluation, as well as the toolkit itself.
You can then engage with the individual resources, depending on what topics you’d like to look at or require more guidance on. You could also watch our second webinar on ‘Using Lived Experience & Steering Groups in Evaluation’, available here.
Please share and get in touch
We will be updating the toolkit with further resources following those, so please do continue to visit the page over the next few weeks and don’t forget to share wider with your frontline colleagues.
Please do get in touch and give us feedback – we would love to hear about what’s been helpful and what you’d like further support with/what new resources you might want to see. Email us at [email protected].