Stockport Progress and Recovery Centre (formerly known as Stockport Day Centre) provided the catalyst for the concept of CORS. Staff were mindful of the impending Individual Budgets and Outcome Focused Intervention reporting requirements, but had a minimal database capability which made reporting quite labour intensive.

Gravitas has worked closely with SPARC to produce a system that optimises outcome recording and minimises time spent on report generation. It has been built to fit in with daily processes and a customisable review mechanism has been developed to make CORS work for the centre.

Activities are pre-entered into CORS with associated outcomes - for example :

Music Workshop will be run weekly on a Monday for 13 weeks. The outcomes will be relaxation, learning a new skill, socialisation.

Cookery Class is to be run every Friday afternoon for two hours which will achieve employability objectives (attendees will participate in NVQ level 1), learning a new skill, & independence training.

By merely attending the centre, a service user may meet certain outcome objectives such as socialisation or anxiety reduction.

The Activity Organiser will update the  Service Users who participated in the Activity after it has taken place.

Case managers/workers have the capacity to add ad hoc information such as risk issues or information pertinent to intervention.

All this information is instantly available to and brought together under one umbrella for each service user, recording a profile of care and interventions in one place: pen picture; next of kin; contact notes; activity record etc. A summary report for the Service user is invaluable input for discussion and evaluation in a review.

SPARC defined their outcomes based on the organisation's aims, and agreed a method to measure them. By reviewing cases regularly CORS is able to evaluate outcomes by comparing these measures over time.

Case reviews are held on referral (baseline) and at regular intervals afterwards.

An optional questionnaire framework have been incorporated into the system to provide guidance on scoring outcome measures. After the second review, CORS can report on Hard Outcomes (improvements in Aims) and sustained Outcomes (improvements sustained for more than one review) .

All outcome measurements, aims and questionnaires are fully customisable and if needed, can be added to or modified in the future.