How does an agency like Family Continuity know whether its work is producing positive results, whether the lives of its clients and families are changing for the better? Every human service organization hopes and believes it is doing good work, but how do they know?

There are many ways, including formal evaluation tools. Family Continuity uses Treatment Outcome Package (TOP) tests to track the progress of our adult clients. TOP is a tool widely recognized for its depth and accuracy, a standard in the field.

 
The testing results are in. Here are some of the indicators of our success, of which we are very proud. A key measurement of the test shows the improvement in our clients' symptoms on an absolute scale compared to other providers.  It shows we had consistently better results on all 11 performance scales, with most results being moderately better than the industry average.  Another scale rates improvement for individual clients over time. It allows us to understand how our services impacted their presenting symptom level of the client.  The results for the most serious problems (depression and suicide), show very outstanding results on 8 of the 11 scales. Family Continuity "did better" than two thirds of all providers and were "better than average" on all 11 scales.

The value of knowing that our staff and services are effective is obvious. But we are also thrilled to have this information to help us improve our services, to constantly improve on our performance. Our Continuous Quality Improvement Committee utilizes this information to determine how well we are serving our clients and in what areas we can continue to improve to best serve our clients.