Access Intelligent Care Platform: Child Safeguarding for Councils

Nearly 50,000 children in England were subject to a child protection plan as of March 2024, which is equivalent to around one in every 240 children. Behind every one of those cases is a dedicated multi-agency team working hard to make the right decisions, at the right time, for children who need protecting. 

But good practice is harder to deliver when the information needed is split across disconnected systems. Both the Independent Review of Children's Social Care and the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel have found that ineffective multi-agency information-sharing is one of the key factors where child protection activity falls short. The ambition to work together is there, but the systems to support it have not always kept pace. 

When a social worker attends a safeguarding strategy meeting, they often arrive without sight of a child's current mental health referrals, recent hospital attendances, or medications. That information exists within NHS systems, but the practical barriers to accessing it in real time remain significant: different logins, different data controllers, different information governance agreements, and simply no time to chase. 

Access Intelligent Care Platform (AICP) is that technology. It gives access to relevant Rio mental health data in a clear and concise way. 

For social care teams, this means safeguarding practitioners can: 

• Access real-time health information within their existing workflow - Rather than requesting records through separate channels and waiting days for a response, practitioners can view up-to-date health data - at the point of assessment, in the strategy meeting, or during a home visit.
• Reduce information-chasing and administrative burden - Before AICP, gathering the health information needed for a single strategy meeting could take hours of calls and emails. With AICP, that same information is visible in minutes.
• Spot emerging risk earlier - When a child's mental health referral is rejected, a parent has been admitted to hospital, or a child has repeatedly attended A&E, that information no longer stays siloed in health systems. The patterns that inform early intervention are visible to the people who can act on them. 

A social worker preparing for a child protection conference on a ten-year-old with a history of neglect pulls up the case record in their social care system. Alongside the family history and previous assessments, AICP surfaces the child's current mental health status: a CAMHS referral made six weeks ago, not yet allocated. A recent A&E attendance recorded in the Rio system. An alert from the community nursing team. 

With AICP, the social worker enters the conference fully informed. The protection plan reflects the complete picture. Health and social care colleagues are aligned from the start. And the child receives a coordinated response from a team that, for once, is working from the same information. 

This is what genuinely integrated safeguarding looks like in practice - and it is what your  council can deliver through AICP.