McKenna, Cate, Rouen, Christopher, and O'Loughlin, Mary (2026) Using social return on investment to evaluate services that support the health of people experiencing homelessness in Australia: a scoping review. Australian Journal of Primary Health, 32 (3). PY25258.

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Abstract

The increasing demand for homelessness services in Australia highlights the need for robust evaluation methodologies to assess their social impact. Traditional economic evaluation methods often struggle to capture the intangible social and health outcomes associated with homelessness. Social return on investment (SROI), an outcomes-based framework driven by stakeholders, offers a flexible and comprehensive approach to measuring social, economic and environmental impacts. This scoping review examines the application of SROI in evaluating services that support the health of people experiencing or at risk of homelessness in Australia. A total of 25 reports from grey literature (2010–2023) were reviewed. The findings reveal significant variability in the application of SROI, including inconsistencies in stakeholder engagement, transparency and reporting practices. The review identifies key challenges, such as difficulties in monetising outcomes, lack of standardisation in methodology and limited peer-reviewed studies. Despite these challenges, SROI offers valuable insights into the broader social value generated by homelessness services, particularly at the local or program level. The study highlights the need for standardisation of SROI reporting, the potential development of domain-specific guidelines and further academic contributions to strengthen the methodology’s application in the homelessness sector. This review underscores the potential of SROI to inform decision-making, improve service delivery and enhance the accountability of homelessness services in Australia.

Item ID:	92303
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	1836-7399
Keywords:	cost-benefit analysis (CBA), economic evaluation, health services evaluation, homelessness, outcomes framework, social impact, social return on investment (SROI), social value, stakeholder engagement, theory of change, triple bottom line, value-based health care
Copyright Information:	© 2026 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of La Trobe University. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)
Date Deposited:	08 Jun 2026 22:54
FoR Codes:	42 HEALTH SCIENCES > 4206 Public health > 420699 Public health not elsewhere classified @ 50% 38 ECONOMICS > 3801 Applied economics > 380108 Health economics @ 50%
SEO Codes:	20 HEALTH > 2004 Public health (excl. specific population health) > 200499 Public health (excl. specific population health) not elsewhere classified @ 50% 20 HEALTH > 2002 Evaluation of health and support services > 200299 Evaluation of health and support services not elsewhere classified @ 50%
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