Service Delivery Plan

Establish The Goals and Objectives of Your Program

As with any program, you will want to establish goals and objectives for your Home and Community Care Program. These goals and objectives should support your Vision, Philosophy and Mission Statements (refer to the Getting Started Handbook for more information on writing your Vision, Philosophy, and Mission Statements).

The goals and objectives will be used for measuring how well your program is doing. By establishing outcomes against each of your goals and related objectives, you can assess whether home and community care services are meeting the need, whether changes need to be made to the program, and the impact the program is having on the health of community members.

Set Goals

Goals are broad statements that describe what programs or activities should achieve.

Goals reflect your program purpose and priorities.

Goals must start with an action verb.

Goals are easily understandable.

Set Objectives

Objectives state exactly what a program should do. They are identifiable and measurable actions to be completed by a specific time. When objectives are stated in measurable time related terms, the evaluation of the effectiveness of your activities is easily evaluated.

Objectives must be closely tied to your goals. The objectives are steps to reach the goals.

These are some of the questions to ask yourself when writing your objectives:

• What do you want to accomplish?
• What will be done?
• How will it be done?
• When will it be finished?

Examples of Home and Community Care Programs Goals and Objectives are attached as Appendix A.

Write Your Goals and Objectives

Review the Vision, Philosophy and Mission Statements of your program. All goals and objectives must fit within the Vision, Philosophy and Mission of the program.

Start with these questions to obtain an overview of the state of your program.

• What is the role of your program?
• What are your main services?
• Who are your clients?
• What is unique about your services?
• What are your services intended to achieve?

Then do the following:

• Identify the long term goal(s) for your program
• Identify the objectives of each program area (the program areas are the building blocks that make up the overall program). These are steps to reaching the program goal.
• Identify the activity(ies) of each program area.
• Determine how you will know when the objectives are met (performance indicators).
• Collect the data.

Identify the Activity(ies)

An activity is something that is done to help meet program objectives. As stated on the previous page, list the broad program areas that you intend to provide and their objective. Identify the activity(ies) for each program area and objective. For example, activities might relate to personal care, home nursing, information and counselling sessions, etc.

Set Performance Indicators

Performance indicators are signs, events or statistics that measure the success of programs or activities in meeting their objectives. Each program area should include one or more success indicators. The greater the number of indicators, the more "rulers" available for measuring the effectiveness of the program activities in improving the health of community members.

The program indicators and data will be described fully in Handbook 6 - Evaluation

Indicators can be:

• quantitative measurement on numbers or statistics
• qualitative measure of satisfaction or opinions
• long term that may take years to show progress
• short term that may be measured in months or a year.

Collect Data

Data is information on the performance indicators you have identified. This data needs to be collected to determine the effectiveness of the program activities.

Example:

• PROGRAM AREA: Home Nursing: Adult Diabetes
  OBJECTIVE: To increase knowledge of persons with diabetes of how to monitor their blood glucose.
  ACTIVITY: Individualized teaching and guidance for clients to monitor, record and interpret their own blood glucose.
  PERFORMANCE INDICATOR: Number of persons with diabetes taught and who demonstrate the ability and knowledge to correctly monitor and interpret their own blood glucose.
  DATA: Client charts. Client booklets in which blood glucose is recorded.

• the goals and objectives of your program
• the activities and performance indicators against which your goals and objectives can be measured
• the data to be collected (refer to Information and Data Collection section of this Handbook)