CC2i & Council Collaboration Headlines: 2023
The fundamental purpose of CC2i is to drive collaborations with local government and technical partners to develop digital solutions to priority service challenges. In 2023 we had a sharp focus on Adult Social Care (ASC), running projects to challenge existing service models, developing new approaches in light of the incoming CQC Inspections, sharing best practice as well as stimulating innovation and ideas.
Alongside our ASC work, we continued to support the critical domain of cyber security and information governance, via our council co-designed Fundamentals Suite. This year saw over 450,000 training modules completed by 38,800 public sector staff and a range of new content delivered, covering everything from FOI, insider threats, malware and more.
As opposed to previous years, our work in 2023 was much more about building on digital products co-designed by councils over the last 12-18 months, specifically sharing stories to enable other councils to understand their purpose, business impact and service benefits. Over half the local authorities in England with responsibility for ASC actively engage with our 2023 work programme, specifically looking at solutions to solve perennial safeguarding information sharing challenges, understanding a new model of outsourcing care & support assessments, and how an underused but universal automated telephony approach can support a range of ASC services.
In fact it has been our automated telephony product – Contact&Connect – that has generated the most interest this year. Whilst Contact&Connect can support any ASC service, there have been three clear winners in terms of both the business case and relevancy, which have caught council’s attention.
Firstly with the incoming CQC Inspection process, engaging with ASC service users is critical – particularly to capture experience and feedback from seldom heard communities. Co-designed with Sunderland City Council, Contact&Connect: CQC is able to gather feedback at scale from all ASC service users, as well as carers and advocates. With the questions (based on the TLAP statements) generating anywhere up to a 65% response rate, and the ability to contact 98% of people in receipt of care, this universal approach is bringing a wealth of feedback and experience back into the council to support decision making, strategy, workforce development, budgeting, contract management and more. What has more recently come to light is how Contact&Connect: CQC is able to support the new proportionate assessment guidance, and offer councils savings of anywhere from £45k-125k+, depending on the number of ASC service users they have. You can read more on the proportionate assessment business case here.
Another ASC service where Contact&Connect can deliver real benefits is Reablement.
Here, specially scripted automated calls check in with people who have recently come off the Reablement pathway (every two weeks for three months) to ensure they are managing at home, able to take their medication, make meals and so on. What is clear now that c500+ post-Reablement service users have passed through the calls, is that councils are able to identify trends in terms of when people might hit crisis or have low confidence. Critically the system alerts the ASC team when someone has had a fall or can’t take their medication, and also reports when someone is struggling more generally – initiating a follow up (human) call – which in most cases is all the person needs to get them back on track, safe in the knowledge that they are ‘seen & heard’ in the system.
Sunderland City Council is our Contact&Connect ‘superuser’, they have six live services which have engaged with over 10,000 ASC service users this year alone. Here their feedback explains why they now consider what role automated telephony can play in every ASC service redesign project;
“It’s worked really well for us in Sunderland. It is a low-tech option. I think we all face the issue of digital poverty and digital inclusion, and Contact&Connect overrides those issues. Most people have a phone – a landline or a mobile phone – so it’s been a really positive experience for us in terms of reaching out to our customers effectively and getting their feedback, whether that be around community loan equipment, reablement or the customer feedback. There are real opportunities to expand our reach quite significantly.”
Another core focus of CC2i’s work this year has been around the Multi Agency Safeguarding Tracker or MAST on which we partner with Policy in Practice. Originally part of the LGA’s Social Care Digital Innovation Accelerator, MAST went live in the West Midlands this October, and also completed the Proof of Concept stage in West Glamorgan.
After 50 years of serious case reviews citing information sharing as a challenge, and the last three annual reports from the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel highlighting information sharing as an area that still needs to be strengthened and improved, MAST has been specifically co-designed by safeguarding partners across the West Midlands to do just that.
With key headline information and safeguarding contact details coming in from multiple systems every night, safeguarding professionals across the West Midlands are now able to use the live data to support referrals, lateral checks and investigations when a safeguarding concern is made. The benefits are significant – many are still emerging – and interestingly they differ from partner to partner. Whilst there is a MAST benefits graphic here, key areas recently uncovered include helping social workers understand family composition by tying people and address data together, being able to understand the frequency and chronology of partners engagement, supporting the child abuse referral process, informing Fire & Rescue’s lone working pilot and identifying high frequency addresses across all safeguarding partners.
Back in Spring, we were really pleased to be awarded iNetwork’s Partnership Excellence Award for our collaborative work with the technical partner Looking Local – involving over 50 local authorities – around the (now paused) Care Reforms. Collaboration is hard, as is developing new digital solutions to complicated ASC challenges.
Across 2022 every ASC team in England was 100% focused on the care reforms, and how they were going to support thousands more people with assessments, the care cap, tracking spending and more. Whilst the government put a pause on the approach in Autumn 2022, we expect they will re-emerge after the next election in some guise, so the base work has been done and there is a significant digital product to build from.
Our current co-funding and collaboration opportunity focuses on Outsourcing Care & Support Assessments, with Reed in Partnership – which also includes an element of a previous CC2i council collaboration BetterCare Support – an approach that a number of councils are actively considering in light of care and support assessment (and review) backlogs. Whilst focus is currently on winter pressures, there is interest to move the project forward in Spring 2024 to see if an outsourced model is workable. This would see councils offering assessments in person, via the phone and – using the our outsourced model – a face to face video based assessment offer. Key to the model is the ability to offer assessments outside normal working hours, as well as cover the different types of assessments from reviews and light-touch, to full assessments and – critically – continuing to hear the voice of the person.
2024 looks set to start at pace:
- First we will start the build of a new Contact&Connect service focused on the recent MHRA Safety Notice (re Bed Rails and Levers). The automated calls will engage all those people who may need their bed rails and levers replaced, refitted and/or who need to be risk assessed;
- We also expect an uptake of Contact&Connect: CQC Inspections services as soon as the dates are released for the next round of local authority inspections;
- Deployment of MAST across West Glamorgan will be the focus of the MAST team for the first quarter of 2024 – as well as engagement with Wales and the West Midlands more widely;
- The behaviour change experts behind the Fundamentals cyber training suite will be looking at new cyber threats for 2024 and updating the guidance and training accordingly
If you have any questions about the work we do, the stories shared above or if you have an idea for possible digital collaboration, do get in touch, otherwise from all of us we wish you a very happy Christmas break and best wishes for 2024.
