Improvements in Wellbeing

Signpost works to improve the quality of life of their beneficiaries. When we measure that in terms of ‘hard’ outcomes such as entering employment or engaging with education or training, it is easy to see the difference we make.

Understanding our impact in terms of ‘soft’ outcomes is more difficult to quantify.

We have many feedback sheets that point to improvements in confidence and self-esteem (arguably the building blocks of good mental health). But these are not accredited in any way.

Over the past year or so we have asked our beneficiaries to complete the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS).

The WEMWBS is a properly constructed psychometric that measures Wellbeing in a reliable and valid way. It also provides a basis for measuring our impact in a statistically significant way (test whether the difference is real – exclude chance). This is much more powerful than the usual feedback sheets and informal surveys that are used to explore soft outcomes.

A graph representing our impact as measured via the WEMWBS as presented abone.

The column marked before is an indicator of the levels of wellbeing in the populations we serve without intervention. This is a good indicator of need and is most likely related to the higher incidence of poor mental health in those populations. 85% had low levels of wellbeing. This is much worse than normal levels.

The second column shows levels of wellbeing after exposure to Signpost. The impact is evident in the graph and these differences are statistically significant.