Table 10. Original objectives and associated progress, challenges and considerations for future work.
| The original research objective | Progress and challenges |
|---|---|
| Pilot the survey via Revolving Doors Agency with 5–10 people with lived experience and make adjustments if needed based on feedback. | Completed successfully. |
| Administer the survey via probation staff over four PDUs, and achieve a minimum response rate of 10%. | Survey rolled out to four PDUs, but we didn’t achieve this response rate. This was largely due to resourcing issues and competing pressures within probation. Interview data suggest that we should slightly reduce the survey length, build the tools into probation systems with prompts for staff to complete them, and ask staff to complete them over several appointments rather than all in one go. |
| Conduct a sensitivity analysis on the impact of whether assistance was required to complete the survey. | Completed successfully. |
| Use demographic data to determine the extent to which survey respondents reflect the population within the national probation caseload. | Completed successfully. |
| Weight the data to better represent the national population in terms of its demographic profile using propensity score weighting. | Data weighted but no significant differences were detected. Weighted analysis is available as a technical appendix on request. |
| Analyse data using descriptive statistics to show (a) the prevalence of needs and (b) patterns of service access and the extent to which needs are being met. | Completed successfully. |
| Explore variation by PDU characteristics (urban/rural) and investigate what effect individual demographics have on health and wellbeing outcomes – comparing sex, age, ethnicity, and past diagnosis to the health and wellbeing outcomes measured on the AUDIT-C, DAST-10, CORE-10 and CANSAS-P. | Completed successfully, except only for male participants. |
| Interview 5–10 staff about their experience of administering the survey – use this to inform a proposed implementation model that will be created at the end of the project | Two staff were interviewed. |
AUDIT-C: Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test; DAST-10: Drug Abuse Screening Test; CORE-10: Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation; PDU: Probation Delivery Unit; CANSAS-P: Camberwell Assessment of Need Short Appraisal Schedule.