Derbyshire County Council - Case Study
Derbyshire County Council’s homecare services work in two different ways, and they work hard to help and encourage all vulnerable individuals to live more independently. They have both a direct care service and an extra care service.
Who are Derbyshire County Council?
Derbyshire County Council is responsible for delivering a variety of services to the local community across the county of Derbyshire. They have multiple teams running different services across the county and work hard to ensure every individual gets the support they need when they need it.
For Children’s and Adult Services, the Council provides end-to-end support for services such as children in care, child protection, fostering and adoption, youth justice, and supporting clients to have a more independent, safe, and fulfilling life, as well as offer better choice and control to clients and their carers according to their individual needs and preferences.
In Derbyshire’s Adult Social Care Services, they offer two homecare services. One is a direct care service and the other is an extra care service to help increase confidence to continue to live independently and delay future care needs.
Their Children's Services offer a wide range of services to support, protect, and safeguard children and their families to offer better opportunities to improve their quality of life.
Equally, their Youth Justice Services work hard to offer support to youth offenders and young adults by offering more positive opportunities for them in employment, education, and training.
Due to delivering diverse services to help cater to every individual need, Derbyshire County Council need processes that are efficient and seamless so support workers and carers can spend more time supporting the individual and concentrate on delivering the best quality care and support instead of spending prolonged periods of time on admin.
What challenges did Derbyshire County Council face?
When running multiple services targeting different social groups and ages across the county, Derbyshire County Council found they were all using the same systems but in different ways. This made tasks very time-consuming and reduced the time that could be spent directly helping the individuals in their county who needed it.
Equally, this also meant there was a lack of consistency in how their data and information was being used and analysed across the different teams. This, in turn, made it difficult to have a clear market oversight to implement their short-, medium-, and long-term strategies to improve the quality of the services delivered.
This also made it harder to identify areas for improvement as every team would experience different challenges at different times. This was the most challenging when team leaders would be off sick and on annual leave and other team members would have to cover not always knowing how the data and information for a particular service is being used.
In general, all their processes across all their services would take a lot longer than they needed to, putting the continuity and quality of their services at risk. Derbyshire County Council needed support to both digitally transform and modernise its services to better support its short-, medium-, and long-term strategies to provide better end-to-end support to all individuals across the county, regardless of the service they need.
The Solution:
For Derbyshire County Council to streamline its services and provide better quality care and support across the care continuum, it needed software that could effortlessly digitise its processes to improve the user experience for staff and for its citizens.
They needed software that was fair, consistent, and easy to use for providers, their citizens, and their end-users.
Derbyshire County Council decided to use our Local Authority Software to do this. Now they have a suite of solutions to support all their services across their children’s, adult social care, and youth services.
They decided to use our software because it offered them a new centralised way to digitally transform their services to create better bespoke packages to meet all the specific needs of the citizens of Derbyshire and adapt as these needs change.
Now they are using:
- Access CM to improve their social care activity recording and scheduling for their short-term services
- Access Mosaic to digitise records and offer an end-to-end solution to access records, data, and information continuously - providing one point of truth about their clients and families they work with.
- Access Synergy to enable a variety of Early Years and Education management services to be delivered digitally
- Access Core+ to effectively support young offenders and young people to achieve positive education and employment outcomes in a single system.
To bespoke and streamline their services further they also use several additional modules for CM such as:
- MaxCare – This allowed all visits to be consistently scheduled across their different teams
- Mileage Wizard – This provided a more standardised way to reimburse carers with their expenses to save time and provide team leaders the confidence that all employees were being paid fairly and accurately
- Mobile App – This allowed all care workers to access the information they needed wherever and whenever they were. Our real-time alerts allowed them to stay informed 100% of the time.
Outcomes:
From using a suite of our local government solutions, Derbyshire County Council has been able to improve the efficiency of the services they deliver across the care continuum so no individual goes without the support they need, when they need it.
From digitally transforming their processes they have been able to improve the quality of the services they deliver from Early Years right through to services for young adults by being able to reduce the time spent on admin and allow more time to be spent with the individual to provide them the personalised care and support they need.
Ultimately, their biggest achievements have been improving the consistency of their services overall. No team is using a solution differently from another and all teams are using the same approach to achieve their short-term, medium-term, and long-term strategies.
Through digitising their processes they have also been able to demonstrate they are following some of the main principles from the Putting People at the Heart of Care White Paper and the Children’s Social Care Reform White Paper.
It is clear there are three main achievements that Derbyshire County Council has accomplished since they invested in our software:
- More streamlined services
- More enhanced reporting
- Increased confidence and engagement
1. More streamlined services
One of the biggest benefits the employees at Derbyshire County Council found is that it saved them a lot of time when completing administrative tasks. Some were fully automated such as mileage reimbursements and others were more streamlined.
Another benefit employees across all their services have found and have said they liked is that all the information and data they needed on a day-to-day basis can be found in one centralised place. This reduced the need to have multiple processes to gain all the information needed to reduce the risk of duplicated records, as well as improve consistency across the whole county.
Access CM specifically has been a key driver for Derbyshire County Council as it has enabled quicker scheduling to ensure all individuals receive the care delivery they need and through providing this information to carers in our mobile app, carers can be alerted in real-time with any changes to schedules or changes to care needs.
One of the biggest impacts that has helped Derbyshire County Council streamline its services is through using Access Mosaic. We have been able to deliver Derbyshire a secure integrated portal to connect social care and the multiple entries of GP, hospital, and outpatient care into a simple single view to provide better access to shared care records and history to gain a more informed and holistic view of every individual’s care records to organise the best personalised and proactive care possible, regardless of the service an individual requires.
This has been critical to the county as they now have an end-to-end solution that offers access to everything from Mental Health to Children's Services, as well as Adult Social Care. It has also made it easier to share records with multiple stakeholders when individuals require more than one service to avoid duplication of data and ensure every stakeholder has the most up-to-date information to deliver the support that is needed.
2. More enhanced reporting
Due to Derbyshire’s diverse range of services it provides across the county, it was essential that after digitally transforming its processes it could enhance its reporting.
Since using our suite of Access Local Government software, all of Derbyshire’s services have been able to keep all their data secure to make better data-led decisions to enhance their reporting and improve planning services for now and in the future. This has been critical for their senior management team – it enables them to improve their resource allocation and make budgets stretch further to meet every individual need across the county.
Using Access Synergy has enabled their Children’s Services to move forward and helped Derbyshire interact with organisations across the county to generate a better co-production approach to improve the quality and continuity of the children's services they provide. Here all payments to all the children's services and early years providers are captured within the system and streamlined so payments can be automatic to improve continuity both now and in the future.
Chris Newton, The Head of Digital and Data Services states:
It’s been a longstanding relationship with the company in terms of its products. Derbyshire has been a customer and user of the Synergy System for a number of years. We helped develop some of the functionality for school admissions quite early on and became an early adopter of the Mosaic system, and the experience has been positive.
3. Increased confidence and engagement
Finally, one of the biggest benefits Derbyshire has been able to experience since investing in our local government software is the increased confidence and engagement of all its end-users, including their residents too.
Through digitising their range of services across the care continuum, end-users are now more confident in using our digital solutions to get the outcomes they need to improve quality of life across the county.
Applications for free entitlement to Early Years childcare, Free School Meals and School admissions, have been massively streamlined for parents and carers. This, in turn, has helped increase engagement by allowing the start of these application processes to happen at home for parents through the online portal so it can be ready to be picked up straight away and avoid long delays.
The overall reduction in delays across all their services has allowed residents to be more engaged and independent whilst ensuring they continuously get the best quality care and support needed even when needs change.
Gina Knowles, Digital and Partnership Lead, Derbyshire County Council explains that:
Our experience with The Access Group has been really positive. We’ve got access to numerous Access products and have great contact with account management to help support our short, medium, and long-term strategies.
The future:
At Access, we have been delighted to be a part of Derbyshire County Council’s digital transformation journey and see the efficiency improvements they have experienced since using our solutions. We work hard to let our customers have the access to do more. For this to happen we have been working hard and have been responding to Derbyshire’s feedback to find new ways to improve their experience further.
We cannot wait to continue working with them to help them progress further with their journey. We have several exciting opportunities in motion such as moving all their applications to the cloud and moving their Mosaic and Core+ applications to a SAAS solution.
We are looking forward to helping them better report on the discharge-to-assess process to help reduce hospital discharge delays and have the appropriate care package needed to increase independence and allow individuals to live in their homes longer instead of relying on residential care homes.
Derbyshire will soon be using the NHS number checker in Access Mosaic so all information can be checked quicker, so processes can be streamlined on a record-by-record basis to ensure all the care needs are addressed, commissioned, and delivered to the highest quality possible.
We have also been in discussions about how we can improve their commissioning services by including our brokerage system in their portfolio to help increase their provider base and improve future planning to have better resource allocation both now and in the future, so they can consistently reach the demand across the county.
We cannot wait to see what else Derbyshire County Council can achieve. For more information on our Local Government Software discover our solutions today and find out how we can help improve the quality of your health and support services across your county today.
Contact us now, and let’s get started revolutionising your digital transformation journey for the better.
