{"id":2001,"date":"2022-02-01T09:49:49","date_gmt":"2022-02-01T09:49:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.alliance-scotland.org.uk\/lived-experience\/?post_type=casestudies&p=2001"},"modified":"2022-02-01T09:49:49","modified_gmt":"2022-02-01T09:49:49","slug":"introducing-a-what-matters-to-you-approach-at-cyrenians-opal","status":"publish","type":"casestudies","link":"https:\/\/www.alliance-scotland.org.uk\/lived-experience\/casestudies\/introducing-a-what-matters-to-you-approach-at-cyrenians-opal\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing a ‘What Matters to You?’ approach at Cyrenians OPAL"},"content":{"rendered":"

The heart of the OPAL service (this link will take you away from our website)<\/a> is our person-centred approach in all that we do.\u00a0 For some time, we felt like we needed to refresh the way we carried out assessments with our clients. We wanted to focus less on asking a series of questions and more on listening to what people were saying, asking them about themselves and tailoring our support to their specific needs.<\/p>\n

We invited ALLIANCE National Lead for Caring and Outreach, Tommy Whitelaw, to one of our team meetings to tell us all about Intelligent Kindness and the \u2018What Matters to You\u2019 (WMTY) approach<\/a>.\u00a0 We were all very moved by what we heard and knew immediately that this approach was a better fit for us. We decided to incorporate it into our day to day practice, assessment and feedback tools.<\/p>\n

The team had also been working with an independent company, Social Lab, who helped us to look at all the services we delivered. We looked at service outputs and outcomes and drew up a logic model to see how everything we do links together and can be measured in a more streamlined way.<\/p>\n

This information, along with the \u2018What Matters to You\u2019 approach (this link will take you away from our website)<\/a> provided a framework on which to base our ongoing assessment tools.<\/p>\n

Our first step was to revamp the assessment tool for our 1-2-1 support. We sought to make this much more about conversation and to include the WMTY approach at the centre.\u00a0 In fact, the very first question we added was \u2018What Matters to You?\u2019.\u00a0 We then removed the questions around physical health, mental health, disability etc. as our referral process already captures this information.\u00a0 We wanted our first contact to be much more about finding out about the client, what matters to them, their interests, and what they want to achieve.<\/p>\n

In the end we came up with a tool that has 3 questions:<\/p>\n