Last year, members of our Research and Evaluation (R&E) team fanned out across the agency to help program areas and functional departments develop performance scorecards.
The purpose of the exercise was to develop and align 10 individual program and departmental scorecards with dimensions of quality so that we can track and monitor the extent to which programs and departments are achieving their objectives and delivering high quality services.
“The challenge is to help staff understand how to best monitor the extent to which they are delivering quality services, whether that be clinical services for children and youth or in functional areas such as Human Resources, Finance or Research and Evaluation,” explains Dr. Alex Elkader, Kinark’s Director of Research and Outcome Measurement.
Dr. Elkader’s team adapted Health Quality Ontario’s quality framework to reflect the community-based nature of Kinark operations and services. Using the adapted framework, R&E worked with each program and functional area to identify and develop performance measures that can be used to monitor service quality and delivery.
Kinark Scorecards:
- Monitor the degree to which we are achieving our objectives and delivering quality services across multiple dimensions of quality
- Identify opportunities to improve our operations and services
- Provide us with regular feedback based on hard data/evidence that we can use to further improve what we do
Results – drawn from a variety of in-house data sources – are compiled quarterly and reviewed by Kinark’s Quality Oversight Committee, where experiences and lessons learned are shared to support quality improvement throughout the organization. A summary report that forms the Balanced Scorecard for the agency is reviewed by Kinark’s Board of Directors twice annually.