Hanon Partners to Launch Virtual Child Protection

Hanon Solutions Ltd, the Scottish data integration specialist, has announced a new partnership to offer local authorities a solution to the Department of Health’s Identification, Referral & Tracking (IRT) initiative.

The off-the-shelf package is designed to help councils ensure that information relating to children at risk is securely shared between relevant organisations.

The need to integrate data and processes to achieve better information sharing between children’s services was brought into stark focus by the case of eight-year old Victoria Climbié. The overall aim of the IRT initiative is to prevent similar cases by creating a national framework that ensures every child at risk is identified, referred to the appropriate preventative services and tracked to ensure that they do not ‘fall through the net’.

Hanon has partnered with Anite Public Sector, a supplier of IT applications to local government, and Capita Education Services, a provider of information systems to the Education Sector, to deliver an integration system for children’s services.

The secure web-browser based system provides a seamless, virtual link between an authority’s social care and education systems to track children at risk.

Hanon says the new solution provides a single point of data entry, giving users with the ability to search on either or both education and social services systems. Alerting functions meanwhile enables more effective management of cases.

The system can be modified to meet the specific requirements of any local authority using SWIFT (Anite’s Social Service’s system) and EMS (Capita’s Education Management Information system) modules.

Neville Cannon, chief executive of Hanon Solutions commented, “Our partnership has enabled us to deliver a unique, ground-breaking solution to IRT and we are looking to expand this relationship to include other system suppliers, thus providing authorities with further added value.”

Hanon says discussions are now underway with a number of authorities to integrate additional systems such as youth offending and criminal justice.

Links:

Hammersmith & Fulham Integrate Care Electronically