In a new wave of suicide prevention policies and activities aiming to stem the growing rate of suicide, the Queensland Mental Health Commission have recently released ‘Every life’, The Queensland Suicide Prevention Plan for 2019-2029. In this blog, we explore what the plan means for your organisation and clients.

In our final blog of the year, we recap on 'the year that was' by showcasing the broad variety of projects we have delivered in 2019 as well as re-sharing all blogs released on our website throughout the year (ideal for reading over the holidays).

Social Return on Investment or SROI is an evaluative approach that combines participatory evaluation with aspects of economic analysis. We take a look at what SROI is (and isn’t), how it differs from other evaluation approaches, and some tips on when to consider using it to evaluate your work.

In consulting, you have to remain at the forefront of many different areas of your field. Mental health is a nation-wide public health priority and thus a hot topic for many organisations that we work with in health and social services. Being informed about all the sectors we work across is one of our core values.

Economics can certainly add the ‘oomph’ factor. Economic tools deal with how well (or poorly) we are using available resources from dollars to human capital, and as the old saying goes ‘there is more than one way to cook an egg’. In the last blog within our Health Economist series, we draw on a couple of examples to show how they can be used to help commissioning organisations.

Resource-based allocation exercises, such as the one we discussed in our previous blogs can be powerful catalysts for moving towards outcomes-based commissioning as it puts a transparent funding formula supported by the best available evidence on the co-design table.

In the real world of service delivery, economic principles are problem-solving tools that use data and modelling to support both strategic and programmatic decisions. They should bring about ‘aha moments’ with insights that managers and program staff can put into practice to achieve their intended vision and goals.

For the real world of commissioning services in the middle of imperfect data and evidence, there is much more to economics than cost-effectiveness and trial evaluations: From understanding where the greatest needs are and how they align (or not) with patterns of resource allocation, through to examining the major cost drivers and frequent users of services.

In this final post of our Evaluation Ready series, we explore a few helpful tips to make evaluation a priority within your organisation. Once you know how to put together a basic framework to guide how to do a program evaluation, the next challenge can often be making evaluation a consistent part of the work you and your colleagues do.