Evidence Guide for Business Services Workbook
Chapters
Introduction
Welcome to the Evidence Guide for Disability Employment Service Organisations.
This Guide has been written for people working in business services – from support staff, to managers, to Board members. It has three main aims:
- to explain the basic principles of evidence/data collection
- to assist with identification of evidence requirements (internal and external)
- to provide some good practice examples.
Business services collect, interpret and store all kinds of 'evidence'. This includes evidence about clients for the Disability Maintenance Instrument (DMI), evidence about internal systems for quality assurance, or evidence about a client for their work assessment.
What's in it?
The Guide is essentially a series of questions and answers about evidence. There are six questions that break up the Guide into clear topic areas, making it easier to find information.
- What is evidence?
- Why do you need to collect evidence?
- What evidence do you need to collect?
- How do you collect evidence?
- How do you use evidence?
- How do you store evidence?
The Guide cover some of the key issues about collecting, using and storing evidence. In the answers you'll find facts, advice and examples.
You may like to follow up some of the resources listed at the end of the Guide, to extend your knowledge and understanding.
How should I use the information?
Remember that this is a Guide only.
Business services differ in size, structure, location and clients. So the way each one manages evidence is different. However, a key aim of this Guide is to provide basic and practical information – a 'this is what you need to know and here are some examples of what you could do' resource, as opposed to 'this is what you must do'.
The examples given throughout the Guide may help set up and/or review the systems in your organisation, so that you approach evidence requirements in a practical and more streamlined way. Even if you only take away one idea that helps you do what you do even better, it's worth it.