View Research by Author - Elaine Morley

More about Elaine Morley's areas of expertise can be found on this Urban Institute expert's page.

Citation URL: http://www.urban.org/ElaineMorley

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are an important problem, for affected individuals, caregivers, and society at large. Numerous remedial efforts have been launched, including the Finding Answers program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Reform calls for documenting disparities, developing and disseminating information about effective remedies, and generating supportive business cases for improvement. This brief report focuses the need for business cases, which are harder to build than might at first appear, as shown by a literature scan and interviews with entities working to reduce disparities under RWJF grants.

The extent of our nation's preparedness to address large-scale disasters will likely receive renewed attention around the anniversaries of Hurricane Katrina and the attacks of 9/11. This commentary recommends that disaster planning address not only the immediate and short-term responses to disaster, but also the longer-term social service needs of disaster victims, such as mental health services and case management. The Urban Institute's study of the American Red Cross September 11th Recovery Program provides a sense of the need for such services and their value to those affected by disaster. Integrating longer-term recovery services into disaster planning can help ensure their availability in the wake of future disasters.

Nonprofit organizations are a crucial link in our nation’s emergency preparedness and disaster response efforts, but their role is not always well integrated into disaster planning. After both Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, nonprofits provided immediate and longer-term assistance to help people cope with devastating life changes and the emotional aftermath, but the importance of long-term services is not well understood or even acknowledged by victims and policymakers alike. This brief highlights the lessons learned from the Urban Institute’s assessment of the American Red Cross September 11th Recovery Program, which provided grants to community-based organizations to provide longer-term case management, mental health services, and other services to facilitate recovery to eligible individuals.

This report examines the implementation of grants issued in 2004 under the American Red Cross September 11 Recovery Grants Program. Using telephone surveys of the grantees, site visits, and a telephone/online survey of clients, the study found that clients were very satisfied with the services and reported positive outcomes. However, more than half said that they needed additional service to continue their recovery. The report discusses six critical lessons that can inform planning for future long-term recovery programs: (1) the stigma attached to receiving mental health services, (2) the need for culturally appropriate services; (3) the importance of outreach efforts; (4) the special challenges of providing services to children; (5) mechanisms for minimizing staff burnout; and (6) establishing simple and effective reporting systems.

This report presents findings of a telephone survey of 1,500 clients who received services under the American Red Cross September 11th Recovery Program. The program provided longer-term assistance, such as case management, financial assistance, and mental health services, to individuals and families with continuing needs related to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Over 80 percent of those who received mental health services said that it helped them cope with stress and other issues, although two-thirds indicated grief continues to interfere with their lives to a large or moderate extent. Additionally, 43 percent said they or their families still needed services to further their recovery.

After investing in identifying and measuring outcomes, analyzing the data, and reporting results to funders, many nonprofits do not take full advantage of their hard work. Nonprofit program managers may use the information, but there are also other important audiences. Some of these are within the organization, for example, board members and direct service personnel, such as service workers and counselors. In addition, there are a number of potential external users. These could include funders, community members, volunteers, clients, and other nonprofit organizations providing similar services. This guide provides ideas on effective uses of outcome information for nonprofits.

[IBM Endowment for the Business of Government] This report, which includes 16 case studies of federal programs, finds that many program managers are using outcome information to trigger corrective actions, identify and encourage successful practices, motivate employees, and for planning and budgeting. It offers recommendations to federal managers such as: making outcome data more useful by breaking it out by customer and service characteristics; providing materials and training to managers and staff to encourage their use of outcome information; holding program review sessions with staff after outcome reports become available to identify where improvement is needed and to suggest improvement actions; identifying and rewarding offices, programs, and facilities that achieve good outcomes; and using outcome data to help identify successful practices and to help identify common problems and solutions.

This report describes, and provides examples of, how nonprofit health and human services organizations use outcome information internally. It is based on an examination of the practices of eight health and human services nonprofits in the Washington DC-Baltimore MD metropolitan area. It also discusses factors that appear to contribute to, or hinder, use of outcome information by nonprofit organizations. The organizations examined most commonly used primarily qualitative outcome information to adjust services for individual clients. We also found many cases of use of quantitative outcome data to identify successes, problems and patterns in outcomes across clients, to identify the potential need for program modifications. This represents a "newer" approach to the use of outcome information by NPOs. However, a number of organizations that collected outcome data did not actually tabulate it, leaving it to supervisors and caseworkers to mentally "process" the data to identify patterns and trends.

Comparative Performance Measurement is a step-by-step guide to using comparative performance measurement (CPM) to improve management, operations, budgeting, and policymaking of an agency or function, and to communicate an agency's successes and remaining challenges.

[Washington Times] The Williams administration's Year 2000 Scorecard pushes Washington in the right direction—toward greater government accountability and better city services. For this, the mayor and his team deserve praise and support. But, as the mayor himself noted, there is room to build on this first step.

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