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Commentary on ‘Using Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation’

This special edition celebrates a British success story but one with international benefit. It is a story of a decade of hard work by a small team, informed by the input of many users, and directed in its development by the necessity of solving unanticipated crucial problems in use if the outcome measure was to achieve its potential. Private and public beneficence provided essential funding in the early stages and prepared the way for a commercial model of revenue generation and more secure development. In this commentary, I concentrate on social and logistic processes in the advance of the CORE System and give it a cautious welcome. Stories are shaped by many influences, some proximate like the professional need of key movers to have a good project, some distant like the restrictive commercial focus of the owners of some copyrighted psychometric measures and a nascent desire by health service purchasers for outcome evaluation and cost-effectiveness. The story told can capture only a few of these influences in a process that is by nature over-determined. Here, the first paper outlines the evolution of CORE-OM and its associated tools, the next three explore its implementation in routine practice from a management perspective and the final one examines its possible use as a supervisory aid. Just as clinical psychologists espoused an identity as ‘scientist-practitioners’ in the USA in the late 1940s and as ‘applied scientists’ in the UK, which has served them well (Barker, Pistrang, & Elliott, 1994), so these papers look forward to the arrival of the reflective practitioner, ready and committed to meeting the demands of the day for transparency, accountability and evidence-based practice. Step forward CORE-OM as a key aid in reflectivity. In their overview, Evans, Mellor-Clark, Barkham and Mothersole identify the formal beginning of CORE-OM as 1995. This is indeed the birth-date