Social care staff at North Yorkshire County Council, one of the biggest local authorities in the country, are to install a new electronic Integrated Children’s System to track the care of vulnerable children.
Liquidlogic’s integrated children’s system (ICS), called Protocol, will provide full electronic visibility of case loads, replacing the paper-based case management currently used.
The council implemented the system in response to the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) initiative for every child to have a record of their care in place on one system.
Guidelines on systems for social services from the department say that authorities must have an IT-based solution that supports practice and case record keeping from case referral to case closure.
North Yorkshire’s ICS project manager, Fran Senior, told EHI Primary Care: “At the moment, we have no electronic system in terms of business processes and care tracking. Practitioners go out to patients to do their job and have to manually complete paper forms detailing assessments which are then passed on to administrative staff to type up and enter into an individual database.
She added: “We had started to consider changing this and then the DCSF stepped in and made it mandatory to have an electronic system for records on children’s care. The fundamental benefit of this will be for practitioners, increasing their abilities to do their job by providing them with a full picture of a case, and ultimately improving outcomes for vulnerable children.”
Once in place Protocol will enable practitioners to concentrate on the more important issues in a case, by gathering and delivering the information they need.
Senior said: “Once the system is used, it will save practitioners so much time. For example, with inspections they don’t have to start the paperwork chain from scratch each time. All the data will be presented to them in a populised manner leading to improved response times and improved practices.”
However, the council has had to phase implementation over the past year, in order to ensure the cultural change was understood by all staff.
“This is a very big cultural change for our staff, and we have to help prepare staff to be able to cope with this move towards electronic filing. There is an awful lot of preparation that we need to do before we complete go-live in January 2008, and we have started doing this through a series of IT skills workshops for practitioners,” said Senior.
Over 500 users will be trained on the system, including practitioners and out-of-hours staff will also be able to access assessments and other work done by the case workers to help ensure continuity. "Managers can also get very easy access to ensure performance is steady and to alert them of key events in the department,” she added.
The council is now holding two launch days in the coming months to demonstrate and go through the changeover with staff.
Senior explained: “As a former social worker myself, I can see the benefits of the system immediately, in that it provides me with all case information immediately at the point of care. Administration paperwork was often a long and tedious task, which involved a lot of repetition. I’m sure the admin staff who typed our notes felt the same."
Senior said the new system will provide North Yorkshire with a common and coherent set of key processes that front line staff and managers can adopt – all the way from first contact with a child, to each review until the case closes.
North Yorkshire are the twentieth local authority to choose Liquidlogic’s ICS system and the company say they now make up 13.5% of the children’s systems market.
Denise Harrison, sales and marketing director at Liquidlogic, said: “The positive experience of using our ICS solutions is now motivating many local authorities to re-examine their existing solutions for Adult Services, as well as Children’s Services.”
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Joe Fernandez