Q. I’m keen to get the Voluntary Sectors on board but it has been quite a struggle with regard to data protocols and information sharing, have you been successful in having any voluntary organisation sign up to E-CINS?
A. We are working very closely with the Trussles clothes and food bank. It’s a great indicator of vulnerability and welfare and – working under the Staffordshire 1 information sharing protocol which you are all welcome to look at – it is designed to have every agency linked up with a common purpose and a common way of sharing information.
All it gives us is a mandate not a mechanism –
E-CINS is that link. We are working with VAST to start to bring in the other voluntary sector services that are identified and demand, the challenge we have now is whilst we can sign them up to E-CINS we don’t want everyone to see everything, The multi-agency team would see everything. If it is statutory intervention it will get escalated. We will always need these but we are trying to build a process that allows us to identify demand when it hits the system so that if Mr Smith presents at a food bank, the food bank searches on E-CINS to see if Mr Smith exists.
We want them to be able to populate a report that would pop up in the key worker’s inbox that is working with Mr Smith. It give us an indicator of the vulnerability of that individual – thats where we’re trying to get to and experiment with currently.
Q. What starting point did you have and how strong were your relationships with partner agencies and third sector when you began this project?
A. It is always a challenge. We got very good buy in from partner agencies, the challenge was the local authority. The appetite within the partners and within the wider sectors was really strong so we then started to see public health being involved, fire and rescue, police, local authority pockets were needed to get strategv buy in and we could only get that with the information we were provided.
Nobody likes to hear they are failing so we managed to get senior leader buy in by setting up a number of boards and it is reviewed on a monthly basis to allow strategic leaders to be brought into that equation but there are pockets within the local authority that are remote of this.
Health are a massive example where we have challenges we are facing because they hold a lot of the cards and if we could start to share that information we would be heading in the right direction much quicker. There is an immense pressure on organisations to change the way we operate and reduce expenditure, how will we do that without a slash and burn policy and this was the way forward we wanted to develop.
Q. What level of service delivery in Health did you try to get the buy in – strategic or the commissioning level of GP?
A. We did try across all areas, now we have managed to bridge gaps with strategic levels so we have Chief Executives on the board who are understanding what we are doing and it’s a real change. It takes a brave leader to drive this change through but we do have the outcome of the Stafford Hospital report and we’re starting to see that health changing the way they work.
We’ve got the Law Commission reviewing data sharing protocols which should hopefully open up the opportunity to start to work in a more joined up way. We have had some successes but only on a case by case basis so far at GP level. We’ve got to prove concept and that’s what we’re doing at the moment.
Q. What team did you have around you and what support did you have to get the mandate and get traction in the first place because what you’ve said makes tremendous sense to us all
A. We didn’t get senior political support until midway through. We got a team of people together first who thought very differently and had a lot of expertise – the Fire and Rescue Service, Local Authority, Health, Education, Public Health.
We used Vanguard to understand the systems processes. We managed to find the traction through the default mechanism failure so we saw where public sector services were failing. Then it was a case of approaching the local authority to show where we were failing but it was still a battle to get consistent resource. We started to see senior leaders stand up from the police, local authorities and fire service.
It’s still an ongoing challenge because it is a fundamentally different way of thinking and in order to facilitate this way of working it requires a cost base that is almost universal across all agencies – that’s a real challenge when we look at protecting budgets. I’m more than happy to share detail with you to give you indicators of what you need to do but its about building a case to start with rather than saying this is our way of working and this is it.
It’s about building confidence, a good set of measures and getting a good team of agencies who want to work differently – fortunately for us we had that.
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