09 Jun Family Context

Posted at 15:56h in Commissioning Alliance News by
3 Likes

We’re excited to share news of a collaborative project with Stockport Council and Social Finance, with funding from DLUHC.

The Family Context Project will deliver a tool to help social workers quickly view key information about families held by other services, in a way which saves them as much time as possible.

The live tool, built by Social Finance with help from ICO, provides a simple interface to search for and view service involvement information on adults & children. It helps to better safeguard families and has the potential to deliver significant administrative efficiencies for local authorities. It does this by matching and aggregating data from education, adult social care & housing into a single searchable view, and giving basic information on service involvement and contact details of relevant professionals for social workers to speak to.

The pilot was conducted in Stockport & Leeds and showed fantastic results, saving an average of 190 hours per year for each social worker using the tool. Social workers in the pilot study reported saving an average of almost 2.5hrs (137 minutes) searching for information for every new referral.

Social workers also described a broader set of use cases than new referrals, including the time saved looking for existing case information, so the total time saved is likely to be much higher than the official reported average.

We are delighted to be partnering with Stockport Council and Social Finance to bring this incredible tool to London. By extrapolating data from the pilot, the potential time saved is equivalent to a conservative estimate of ~100 to 150 extra social workers for the capital.

Please have a look at this quick video demonstration: https://vimeo.com/713297469

The first phase of this project is currently underway, and we are actively looking for London local authorities to participate. If you work for a local authority in London and would like to be involved, please get in touch via the contact form or by emailing Jonny on Woodthorpej@ealing.gov.uk