OCAY LONG TERM IMPACT STUDY

December 2021

A team of volunteers and OCAY staff members formed a working group to develop the questionnaire, a script, and the method of delivery. The script and questionnaire were drafted to enable a degree of consistency in how longer-term impact was to be explored. Idea development took place via Zoom and email. A pilot survey was undertaken in May 2021.

Following piloting the original survey in May 2021 and report in June 2021, it was decided that it might be beneficial to collect the case type. This was to allow responses to be examined via this lens to see if any patterns could be determined, or whether the type of issue had any bearing on how respondents answered. The case type was provided to the volunteers undertaking the survey and added to the questionnaire when being completed. Case type was then grouped (family, health/care, housing, consumer issues, finance, employment, benefits) to ease analysis.

A sample of 30 clients were selected at random to be interviewed. All the cases had been closed between six and 12 months before the interviews took place. A team of five volunteers used the script and questionnaire to undertake the survey over the telephone in November 2021. The volunteers who carried out the survey had not worked with the clients previously. This was decided to be the most appropriate way of gathering responses to enable participants to answer the questions honestly. A letter was sent to each client informing them of the survey, when they would be contacted, and by whom.

A total of 24 clients agreed to complete the questionnaire, an 80% response rate. The clients who did not participate in the questionnaire were either unable to remember working with OCAY, were ill or did not answer the telephone when called.

There was variation in terms of whether each respondent answered all questions, and this is noted against each question below with reasons for non-completion if available. The clients who did not participate in the questionnaire were either unable to remember working with OCAY, were ill, or did not answer the telephone when called.

Of those who agreed to complete the questionnaire, 6 clients had help with consumer issues (25%), 6 with housing issues (24%), 7 with benefits (29%), 4 with health/care issues (17%) and one with a family issues (4%). This compares with our statistics for all cases at end of Q1 2021-22, the period when the sample cases had been closed, as follows consumer issues 19%, housing 23%, benefits 26%, health/care 28%, family 0%, finance 4% giving a fairly representative sample.

The Full Report from the Survey can be found here: Summary of results from the pilot Long term Impact Survey January 2022