News item

Bradford Council Opts for LiquidLogic ICS

Bradford Metropolitan District Council’s Children’s Social Care department has gone live with Liquidlogic’s PROTOCOL Integrated Children’s System (ICS), making the council compliant with the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF)’s ICS Phase 1 and 1b requirements. Bradford has also integrated Liquidlogic’s Error Tolerant Search Module with PROTOCOL ICS, ensuring that fuzzy logic is applied when searching for details of vulnerable children to remove the risk of duplicate files being accidentally created.

Children’s Social Care at Bradford has five major sites across the Metropolitan district, which includes: - four Children’s Centres, one Family Centre, eleven Residential Children’s Homes and a number of small specialist services and teams. PROTOCOL ICS provides the 764 staff spread across the dispersed sites with access to improved data quality, availability and timeliness of information on vulnerable children and young people. Thus ensuring that care practitioners have a holistic view of a child’s wellbeing in spite of their location or who last worked updated a particular file.

Linda Peltier-Binns, Bradford Council’s ICS Project Manager comments “Like many other councils we struggled to meet the initial ICS timescale, so it was imperative that we chose a solution and a partner that could ensure we are on top of all future ICS requirements. Liquidlogic’s PROTOCOL solution was not only the first to be approved by the DCSF for Phase 1 compliance, but it had already addressed Phase 1b compliance, making it an obvious choice for us. Equally, any project with an IT element can only be successful if the system is reliable, easy to navigate and reflects the way in which users do their job. Once fully in place we believe Liquidlogic’s PROTOCOL ICS will tick all of these boxes.”

To fully prepare for the ICS go-live, Bradford Council provided a comprehensive training programme, which includes large scale presentations, face-to-face briefings and the establishment of a ‘User Group’ to ensure that front-line staff felt fully involved in the change process.

“Implementing ICS has been hard work, as it required a major cultural change for social care and a great deal of effort from managers and staff at all levels within the council. However, this change process was made easier by the availability of support from Liquidlogic. It is not just about the skill level of the team, it is about that team being available when you need them. It was this availability that prevented minor implementation issues turning into major issues.”

The new system will not only improve efficiencies in local case management and resource allocation assessments, but will also help inform statistical reporting projects on a national scale.

01/01/01