Forms, Forms, Forms

Here's a very interesting post from 'The Social Care Experts Blog' and I think it sheds some light on the current methods of data collection within Social Service delivery...

"Spending more time with clients and using our discretion rather than box-ticking will help prevent the tragedy of more Baby Ps. Now the initial media frenzy over the death of Baby P has subsided it is possible to have a more sober look at the situation.

First, as Professor Colin Pritchard has noted, child protection services in England and Wales are among the most effective and most improved in the world. Despite this ... one telling fact is that 80% of social workers' time is spent form-filling rather than seeing their clients." (Source: Steve Rogowski)

The ICS system is going to come under some serious scrutiny and I think in many ways, it will be justified if found to have introduced an unprecedented amount of bureaucracy into service delivery. Reports from the front line of social care and social work professionals does seem to indicate that the nature of their role has been changed by the introduction of various technologies over the years.

This is nothing new. Technology often is the easy target in these situations but has the introduction of a new IT system within social work changed the very nature of the job?

I'm not too sure it's that simple.

Technology exists to support people's roles in order to help them do their jobs. The whole point of introducing a new system is to maintain a high standard of delivery in the most cost effective way, with a growing population and reducing budgets. What IT isn't designed to do is change the actual role of the social worker and morph it into something new.

More investigation will be needed but surely enterprise mobility has a role in all of this? In order to remedy these 'form filling' exercises isn't the answer to simply find a better way to collect the information at source and in a structured manner that doesn't require any re-entering at a later date? This would also mean that the critical information that is being collected can be securely made available to the right people at the right time (and not sitting on admin's desk in paper format where it's no help to anyone).

In this day and age when technology should be preventing the rise of administration overheads in government services, we see reports like the one above appearing that lead us to question where our taxes are going.

I think the reality is that the ICS and the providers of those systems have most likely pulled together extremely useful software packages that are capable of sharing data with the relevant authorities in line with the government rules and regulations that have been created through the Childrens Act 2004 and the more recent Adult Services changes. This notion however, works on the assumption that the data was easy to get into the systems in the first place.

By the sounds of things, that's the issue. So ask yourselves the question:

"How am I getting my data into my systems (or even better 'when' am I getting my data into my systems)?"

And can a mobility package allow your workforce to deliver the services they are trained for?

Tom
(Business Development Manager)