Evidence Based Decision Making

Overview

Evidence is essential to enable any organisation to make better, more informed, objective, clear and precise decisions about the design and delivery of services.  But it always needs to be integrated with experience, expertise and judgment.

Evidence can help:

• identify potential problems and opportunities
• generate and assess options, e.g. for business cases, for planning
• evaluate delivery performance, e.g. cost effectiveness, impact, customer service
• develop staff performance
• feedback lessons into future designs.

Programme Aims

The aim of this programme is to provide participants with an understanding of:

• What evidence-based decision-making is 
• Why it is important
• The impact of the decisions they make, and
• How to empower staff to make their own decisions.

Programme Objectives

By the end of the programme, participants will be able to:

• Name the stages of the decision-making cycle
• Identify the key features of evidence
• Use a range of techniques for good decision-making practice
• Identify opportunities to use existing evidence and data
• Communicate their decisions clearly and consistently for different audiences.

Preworkshop Assignment

The topics covered by the pre-workshop assignment include:

• What is evidence?
• The difference between quantitative and qualitative evidence?
• The quality of evidence
• Where within the system can evidence be obtained?
• The purpose of obtaining evidence
• The presentation of evidence.

Workshop

The workshop includes a series of practical exercises covering:

• A recap of the pre-workshop assignment
• Why we need evidence
• The quality of evidence
• Correlation vs causality
• Qualitative vs quantitative evidence
• Decision making techniques
• Communicating your decision
• Helping others make good decisions.

Post Workshop Activities

• Convene a small group to apply tools to a real example
• Write a brief case study to share with colleagues.