Second largest county drops paper chase for child care planning

Liquidlogic delivers electronic child care planning across the six districts of Cumbria

Leeds, Monday 22 January 2007 – Liquidlogic, a leading provider of collaborative software to the public sector, has delivered a phased roll out of its electronic case planning and management system to Cumbria County Council. In partnership with its technology partner, Agilisys, Cumbria chose Liquidlogic’s PROTOCOL Integrated Children’s System (ICS) to provide the council with full visibility of its case load across all of its six districts.

With less than half of Cumbria’s population living in urban areas, it is essential that the Integrated Children’s System (ICS) facilitates consistency across the county. Liquidlogic’s PROTOCOL solution was designed to integrate in real time with Cumbria’s existing social care system, by utilising Seagull Software’s LegaSuite application. The ‘robotic control’ between Cumbria’s social care system and PROTOCOL, maximises efficiency of staff by ensuring that all aspects of a children’s care package is incorporated into one electronic file.

Liquidlogic’s Integrated Children’s System (ICS) facilitates a personal work tray for the 650 care practitioners with summaries of tasks and alerts. It incorporates initial Contact, Child Protection, Looked After Children, Pathway and Adoption plans, with full version history of plans, service scheduling, automatic review flags, full event history and a colour-coded system for pending and overdue events.

Jo Fox, senior project manager in the Children’s Services department at Cumbria County Council, said: “Due to the county’s wide geographic spread, children’s case files were being passed between districts and had the potential to go missing. The introduction of the electronic system has meant that care workers now have immediate access to case files, without having to travel across the district.”

Jo Fox continued: “One of the surprising benefits of the system is how it helps practitioners to order their thoughts. The ability to loop information through the care assessment and case notes has enabled practitioners to get a clear view of what new information means for the care of the child.”

The system enables the head practitioners within Cumbria to have tighter management and control of the 114,000 children’s case files across the county, ensuring all cases are monitored and tracked in accordance with best practice.

Helene Francis, senior project manager for Agilisys comments: “For care workers, the knowledge that there is an extra pair of eyes monitoring their case load, relieves some of the pressure of meeting case file deadlines and best practice guidelines. It essentially means that cases can not slip through the net. For example, if a practitioner takes long-term sick or workload is mounting, the assigned case load can be re-assigned easily.”

Liquidlogic worked with Agilisys to provide six-week training programmes in each of the six districts, addressing the needs of all of the different groups involved in the care of a child (covering the Pathway Team, Family Support Team, Social Workers, Family Placement Officers and Family Workers). The training included IT workshops and change management agents to help dispel any miss-conceptions or fears of the new system.

Neil Polson, business development Manager at Liquidlogic said: “The cultural shift of moving to an electronic system was viewed with initial scepticism at Cumbria - as practitioners feared they would be turned into administrators and taken away from working with families. However, it seems to have had the opposite effect. The electronic system has enabled Cumbria to reduce time frames for completing assessments and care plans, as much of the information they require is already held within the system.”