Challenge
ILLY has worked with four West Midlands authorities to support the Troubled Families initiative. The programme encourages services to take a more coordinated, whole family approach to better support and challenge families with complex needs.
The existing processes and systems, however, focus upon the individual and the plethora of existing systems do not ‘talk’ to each other. As a result there is no centralised view of the household needs, risks or key activity.
This highlighted the need to provide an easy way to improve data sharing to combat disjointed working. There was also a need for a single view of the household and a mechanism to simplify the PbR claims.
Strategy
ILLY collaborated with Walsall, Dudley, Wolverhampton and Solihull councils to establish and share best practice across the region.
The teams were able to identify the key challenges, requirements and information necessary to enable this new multi-agency, whole family approach.
There was a clear objective; any system must help front-line workers do their job, provide a single view of the household and automate the PbR claims. LINKS Families was designed as the centralised family focused tool to sit above all existing systems to support these requirements.
Results
LINKS Families is helping to enable local authorities achieve real service transformation.
At an operational level, the centralised, whole family view empowers professionals to make informed decisions that address the root causes based upon real-time information.
From a strategic perspective, the system provides unique insight into what is effective and commonalities across the cohort by allowing commissioners to compare service performance across directorates as well as identify commissioning needs and workforce development issues.
Feedback
“We are engaging our partner agencies to enable a whole family approach. Key within this will be the process and tools that we will use and our joint collaboration with ILLY Systems will offer the experience, functionality and opportunity to innovate our aspiration”
(Melanie Lockey, Solihull Troubled Families Co-ordinator)