“E-CINS is brought to you by Empowering-Communities. We are a not-for-profit social enterprise and our aim is to empower vulnerable people and their families.
How We Will Grow E-CINS in 2014
It’s all about how we can do it together, it’s about the promotion of a way of working. 2014 will be our fourth year. We are now live in over 30% of the police force areas in England and that could be as much as 50% in 2015 or even next year. We now have 402 teams and organisations accessing the system.
E-CINS is a national database and because of the non-commercial aspects of it we have enabled all sorts of organisations to use it, large and small. This is important because we are at the forefront of making a change in getting rid of the mindset of silo working. There are dangers associated with that way of working – it doesn’t make financial sense and it also comes at a human cost. If you google serious case reviews, it’s the same thing all the time – failure to share information effectively and communication with partners.
On a more local level and something we have to promote to your staff is that working in that silo world, practitioners can sometimes limit that view of the world to their job or their team. They are so focused on what they are doing they are not seeing the bigger picture. There is also a danger that they don’t see how what they are doing contributes to the rest of the work that is going on around a victim, an offender or a vulnerable person. The risk is that they don’t see the risk or vulnerabilities and we are all tasked with changing this world.
It is probable that within many counties there are agencies who could be accessing E-CINS for free but they are just not aware of it. It is very important that within your areas you keep sending out key messages and raise awareness at Chief Executive level across all your organisations, partners and at practitioner level too.
The Next 12 months
We all need to be engaging with partners, maximising participation and keep reinforcing E-CINS’ no limits policy. We have situations sometimes where practitioners do not realise that they can have as many people as they want in their team accessing E-CINS.
You are going to have to win hearts and minds. Some individuals may not see how relevant it is to them and you will need to sell the concept in their world. For example Reactive Response Officers may say ASB is for the Safer Neighbourhood Team, not them. Or Environmental Health may be looking at a premises for one thing and they are ignoring the potential hate crime or DV issues within that premises. We need to think outside the box to achieve the concept. As Julian Blazeby, the ACC of Staffordshire said last year – the limit for E-CINS is really your imagination and we are going to have to be imaginative to get as many people signed up as we can.
When one organisation comes on board it opens up partner opportunities for so many more i.e. when E-CINS began to be used for licensing it got the Fire and Rescue team on board, Trading Standards and Council departments too. Cambridgeshire found that if people are resistant then the best solution is to get them on the system and then they see the benefits and start to use it.
One county intend to sign up all their 400 schools and there could be clear advantages and cross overs into areas such as IOM, Troubled Families and Emergency Planning etc.
- National Dementia Database
In the news recently there was a call for a National Dementia System. E-CINS is the ideal platform to operate such a system. We are in the process of setting a dementia pilot up within Suffolk and we will keep you updated with progress.
Setting up your own multi-agency working group, whether it’s on a district or county wide basis, would be of huge benefit to your scheme. Sussex Police are holding their own E-CINS Conference next week and Mel Locke is setting that up, I’m sure it will be a success and it might be something we look to replicate.
Newham started off with IOM and then very quickly signed up the gangs and firearms team. They are signing up their A&E department, Mental Health are on board and it’s moving very quickly in areas which have traditionally been considered quite difficult to reach.
- Managing Offenders and their Families
Of all the profiles we have on the system 815 of those are also in the families gallery. Over 1600 profiles are young people.
A recent news article highlighted the effects on society, particularly children, when a parent is in prison.
- 200,000 children every year are affected by the imprisonment of a close relative, primarily a parent.
- 7% of children will see a parent go to prison during their school lives.
- 24% of men in young offenders institutes are either fathers or will soon be fathers
- 65% of boys who have a convicted parent will go on to offend.
- Children with a parent in prison are more likely to develop mental health problems and three times more likely to be involved in ASB or delinquent behaviour.
There is a real risk to society and we are going to try and change things.
If you are managing offenders you probably create the profile and that is how you work with the person. My proposal would be, in the right circumstances, to adopt the troubled families model and instead create the offender as a case. You can still manage them individually but you could also look at the family unit – do you know whether the youth offending service are doing any work with children within in the family? They might not fit within the criteria for the Troubled Families Programme but t might be a way to engage with partners and start interventions earlier than would usually be possible.
E-CINS In The Last 12 months
- We were invited to speak to senior managers at The Information Commissioner’s Office. They liked that everything was in one place, the audit trails and the fact that it reduces the need to email, print and make phone calls.
- We have achieved IL3 accreditation for E-CINS, not just through piggy-backing on data centres but by accrediting the system itself, the infrastructures and the data system. We are also accredited 9001 and we have policies and procedures to follow on that.
- We now have an E-CINS National Security Working Group which meets every six months.
- We held two user groups in September covering Education, Child Sexual Exploitation, Troubled Families and ASB. It’s been suggested that we might need a National or Regional User Group, which we would welcome your views on. Several counties who currently use E-CINS border each other and use it for cross-border information sharing.
- Scotland Yard invited us to meet with them about Operation Holdcroft which is focusing on gangs coming out of London, mainly using the railway networks and identifying vulnerable people around the country. My understanding is that it is going to be a very co-ordinated approach and counties who are not yet live on E-CINS will be able to use the system as part of the operation.
- We are pleased to be working with Paladin on National Stalking.
- We’ve had some positive meetings in Wales mainly around the MASH which is very encouraging and many others have spoken with us about using it for MASH too. Wales are looking at the process and procedures around high risk referrals coming in and the tasking out. We are looking at a new format for a MASH dashboard to help when managing high risk on a daily basis.
- New Functionality – we work in an agile development environment which means we can turn around changes very quickly.
- Server load balancing – the way we have set the system up is to share the load so that it prevents database crashes, it is scalable by number of users and keeps speed up as well. The average UK web page load time is 5 seconds, E-CINS comes in at just over 1.25 seconds.
- API/Application Programme Interface – this is essentially one system talking to another – it’s always been available since we’ve been live but several of you now are having serious conversations with us around utilising it.
You can either retrieve information out of E-CINS and into your other systems or you can put information into E-CINS from your systems.In theory, E-CINS will work to link up different organisations’ databases using the access permissions tick boxes already available. RAPI is free, there is no cost if you are taking information from E-CINS, you would just need to add the connectors at your end.
Team E-CINS
We have been incredibly busy and it shows that we focus on the user experience. We want to motivate users to use the system and we are now managing over 15,000 profiles. An average user is now looking at 19 pages of information, and spending 22 minutes per visit. What is really remarkable is that since the conference last year the users have viewed over 2.5 million pages on E-CINS.
This goes a massive way to help achieve what we wanted to do – create an environment where everyone knows what everyone else is doing and identify risk as early as possible.”
Read more summaries of the speakers’ presentations in Related Posts here.