Measuring what matters in social care

23 September 2025

Senior evaluation lead Emyr Williams is passionate about improving the lives of people accessing care and support. In this blog, he explains how adopting evaluation approaches that focus on outcomes can help transform services for the better.

Why we value an outcome-based approach

Our work is informed and shaped by policy and legislation. The Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 strongly emphasises an approach to supporting people accessing social care services that’s strengths based and outcome focussed.

The Performance and Improvement Framework for Social Services also stresses the importance of measuring the outcomes for people accessing care and support.

Evaluation can be challenging

We recognise that evaluation can be a difficult process. Understanding the outcomes people want to achieve from your support is often complex. Needs can vary significantly from individual to individual and from service to service.

It takes time to build relationships and understand what truly matters, so identifying outcomes is never a simple process. Once identified, knowing how to measure and show progress against those outcomes can seem daunting, especially with limited time and resources.

“It gave a panoramic overview of evaluation, new areas to explore and the resources were fantastic!”
- Participant in one of our previous evaluation training series

Our support offer

We’ve developed our ‘Demystifying evaluation’ training sessions, to support you through the evaluation process. Our free and accessible online sessions give you some tools and techniques to think about and evaluate outcomes in different ways.

The sessions cover:

a basic introduction to evaluation
using a story of change to develop action and evaluation plans
ethical considerations you'll need to consider in your evaluation
guidance on how you can carry out an economic evaluation
creative and participatory methods that can help you gather outcomes in innovative ways.

Our approach is flexible, so you don’t have to attend all the sessions and can pick and choose the ones that are most relevant to you.

We also offer one to one support alongside the training, if you want more tailored support for your particular service.

“I found this session very useful and great to be with others sharing their experiences.” - Participant in a previous evaluation training session

Find out more!

If you’re interested in finding out how you can demonstrate the impact of your work and show the change you’re making to people’s lives, sign up for our next evaluation training series here.

You can also learn more about our evaluation support offer here: Evaluation support - Social Care Wales - Research, Data & Innovation.

Blog written by

Emyr Williams

Senior evaluation lead

research@socialcare.wales

I’m passionate about the importance of social care and the difference it can make to people. That’s why I want to support evaluation to help you learn, and demonstrate the impact you're having on people’s lives. I have over 15 years of experience in demonstrating impact across a variety of social policy areas, from working in front line service delivery to providing evidence based policy advice to Welsh Government.

My previous roles include: running a youth charity, community development, carrying out research at the Welsh Centre for Public Policy and Y Lab, as well as supporting and evaluating the impact of innovations in the public sector. So if you’d like to find out if I can help your work, do get in touch for an informal chat, and I'll do my best to help out in any way I can.