What works

The fourth of our themed workshops was attended by 17 practitioners across 12 organisations. The aim of this workshop was to exploring the broad range of issues surrounding ‘What works’. Engaging in evidence-based practice was central to some our practitioners work, whereas for others, this was a component to their work, rather than every day practice.

We began the workshop by exploring and clustering issues that related to what works.

This identified four key themes to the issues that are arising in practitioners’ work:

1. What works in sharing research findings – this was particularly focussed on how could practitioners share messages to the general public.
2. Information sharing – how can practitioners share good practice amongst themselves more effectively and harness good practice.
3. How can we evidence effectiveness in preventative work? – developments in this area has seen more proactive and preventative work being engaged in, but how can we know that this work is effective.

Again, we went through our filtering process and two of these areas were identified as key areas to focus on: (1) What works is sharing research findings and (2) How can we evaluate preventative work? Participants then worked in one of two groups to break these topics down into key questions to address:

1. How are we evidencing measuring effectiveness in proactive and preventative work? (led by Dr Lucy Neville)
   This project will look at what we know works/is best practice in relation to proactive and preventative work, exploring practice across the EMPOWER network to explore the different ways in which this is being carried out.
   Due to the timescales involved to engage with schools, this mini-project was not completed within the timescales of the project. 
2. What works in communicating messages about VAWG to the public? (led by Professor Teela Sanders)
   This project will review the literature regarding public communication and also speak to a small number of practitioners to explore the methods of communication that they use.
   The findings from this project can be found in the Project Summary: Public Communication (PDF, 495kb).