County local authority highlights two projects from information sharing programme beginning to produce benefits for social care
Wiltshire Council has claimed two sizeable steps forward in its Single View programme to promote information sharing between public sector organisations in the county.
The first GP practice has taken up its Adult Care Information Sharing system, and the local fire service is now using social care information to improve safety arrangements for people with disabilities.
Kevin Marshall, senior programme manager at the council, has presented the details as a case study to local government network iStand.
It says that in 2015 the council developed a business case under the Better Care Fund for information sharing between local public services, and launched the Single View programme in partnership with eight other bodies, including Wiltshire Police, Dorset & Wilshire Fire and Rescue Service, the South Western Ambulance Service, the Wiltshire Clinical Commissioning Group and four healthcare trusts.
It developed a browser based IT system with the data sharing processes, role based access and governance structure, and began working on a number of “product cases” to prove its viability.
Supporting GPs
This led to the development of the Adult Care Information Sharing system to provide GPs with access to relevant council information, aimed at helping them in referrals for care packages.
It has now gone live in the first surgery at Bradford-on-Avon. The case study says it is providing the doctors with continual access to adult social care information and a clearer understanding of patients’ needs, along with speeding up referrals.
The second product, Safe and Well, has begun to provide social care information to the local fire service. This has enabled its officers to identify disabled people who need home safety visits with assessments on fire hazards and, if necessary, smoke alarms.
The case study says that in its first week in operation it was used to make contact for visits to 12 homes.
Five other product cases are being developed, taking in:
- Using police information to alert mental health officers when patients have a firearms licence.
- Providing police with access to council held addresses.
- Sharing social care information with the council tax service to support decisions on people who have defaulted on payments.
- Cross matching council tax and electoral registration data to identify invalid claims for a single occupier discount.
- Enabling the children’s safeguarding team to search for agencies to whom a child or family is known.
“As a measure of the success so far, we have received very positive references from health and fire who are already recognising benefits from the first two data sharing product cases,” the document says. “Demand is now high for the ACIS product case to be rolled out across all Wiltshire surgeries and the three acute hospitals.”
Image by SeRVe Photography, CC BY 2.0 through flickr
