Professor Roy McConkey was commissioned by the National Federation to carry out an evaluation of the Immersion programme which took place in April 2013. The evaluation had three main aims.
- To celebrate the achievements;
- To share the learning gained and the difficulties that had been encountered,
- To identify the national issues that required to be addressed.
Several sources of information were used by Roy when compiling the evaluation i.e. progress reports and questionnaire responses from organisations that participated in Immersion, interviews with change team leaders, focus groups with people supported in two locations, and an event held as a follow on to a General Assembly meeting of the National Federation on 17th September, 2014.
The recently completed report contains a succinct account of the high level learning to emerge from the Immersion Programme.
The following are the recommendations of the Report.
- It is recommended that this report is made available to the change teams in all the services which participated in the Immersion Programme. This circulation might be widened to the broader membership of the National Federation.
- A second recommendation is that the Steering Group that led the Immersion Programme is recalled or possibly reconstituted and charged with collating responses to the Evaluation Report and proposing a future action plan around personalisation to the National Federation’s Board of Directors and the General Assembly. This would take account of available resources and priorities but build on the ethos of Immersion and personalisation.
“The Immersion Programme was another step along a road to better lives and it is commendable that the National Federation felt able to provide the leadership to make it happen” – Roy McConkey.