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Susan Richardson
Working in children's services is highly pressured and important decisions have to be taken everyday on the unique support requirements for children.
The ability to collaborate, gather information from multiple sources and share information is crucial in enabling practitioners to make fully informed decisions.
Our children's services team needs to work with many different agencies – from health centres and police forces, to primary and secondary schools and A&E departments, to ensure children and families are correctly assessed and receiving the right care package.
'Child in Need'
In St Helens, through our 'Child in Need' processes we aim to place the child at the centre of multi-agency working, focusing on early intervention where possible. Five years ago, we brought together our education and social care functions, as well as the early years/Surestart functions, each with different systems and processes for dealing with children and young people.
It was immediately obvious that we needed a single system with a common framework for case recording and management that worked across council services, as well as across partners.
For this, we have integrated three IT systems - Integrated Children's System (ICS), electronic-Common Assessment Framework (eCAF), and Capita One (Education Management System) into a single view of a child's record, achieving real-time collaboration between the education systems and children's early intervention and social care solutions.
The Common Assessment Framework (CAF) is a key assessment tool to support early intervention, with the aim of ensuring concerns and issues are resolved at the earliest point possible. We are now moving from paper-based CAFs to eCAFs, and see these as a key enabler, as part of our wider systems integration.
So far we have trained more than 300 users from a large range of teams and agencies on Single View and eCAF, including, schools, education welfare, teenage pregnancy teams, family support teams, housing and children's centres.
Naturally, there are appropriate automated access rights depending on the practitioner or organisation in question.
For St Helens, this is all part of a long term plan for integrated multi-agency working across the borough and it was essential that the IT systems we implemented are scalable and easily integrated with future IT systems.
Being vendor-agnostic was just as important as ease-of-use for the users.
Our ICS, eCAF/CAF and Single View systems are all from Liquidlogic but we have already integrated these with our education system provided by Capita, and plan to link them into further systems across our partners.
The Single View and eCAF system is already proving incredibly useful for practitioners in providing a complete view of a child's history, as it is possible to link together information from disparate systems.
Information contained within the education system can be flagged, such as absences from school or attainment data. We believe that IT systems are a potentially powerful tool to assist staff from all agencies in supporting children and families, and to facilitate the exchange of information in an effective way.
Different practitioners
It is difficult to give a precise figure on the time we have saved, but we do know that our Integrated Children Disability Service (see below) halved the time taken to do initial social care assessments. There's also a reduction of the impact on families during a stressful time, as they do not have to repeat the same information to different practitioners.
Time is also saved because a practitioner can access useful information via the single view systems, such as identifying people already involved with the child or young person. That reduces the time spent chasing round and is a signposting service so our practitioners know who to contact for further information.
No data is actually stored on single view, which acts as a portal into the linked, integrated systems, and the access rights of individuals are respected in single view. So if a practitioner is not allowed access to the ICS system, they will not be able to access any social care assessment information; all they will see is who the allocated social worker is. Further restrictions can be applied to particularly sensitive cases.
We have a duty to ensure the accuracy of information across our services and the provision of one core record linked to all services meets that requirement. This also has a key benefit for safeguarding as all records through a child's life can be linked to one demographic record, ie data accuracy is improved, which is often a problem with disparate databases. We have had an internal Caldicott and data protection expert review the system and it have signed off as good practice.
We have focussed our efforts on working closely with staff and colleagues to develop user friendly, efficient and effective systems and these have been well received by practitioners.
Case study: Integrated Children Disability Service
A disability and family support coordinator at a local Integrated Children Disability Service used the single view and eCAF system to help provide additional support to a single carer of a young boy with autism.
The child was not known to ICS, but by pulling together information from all the systems linked to the CAF system (via single view), including the education system, the coordinator was able to create an up-to-date picture of the child's history and requirements.
From this, the practitioner accurately identified the child's needs and how these could be best met by the social care teams, and then used the eCAF system to transfer the assessment straight through to the ICS system and social care teams, where it formed the basis of the initial social care assessment. This increased the speed of assessment and ensured that the single carer did not have to repeat their story to social services.
Susan Richardson is director of children's services, St. Helens council
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