News item

Surrey County Council Chooses Liquidlogic ICS & eCAF

Liquidlogic, a leading provider of collaborative software to the public sector, today announced that it is delivering its PROTOCOL Integrated Children’s System (ICS) and PROTOCOL e-Enabled Common Assessment Framework (eCAF) to Surrey County Council’s Children, Schools and Families directorate to achieve greater efficiencies in the delivery of children’s social care.

Surrey County Council is one of the largest local authorities in the country, with a population of approximately 1.1 million spread across 11 boroughs. The council’s Children, Schools and Families directorate is responsible for the social care and safeguarding of children and young people, and has 700 social work practitioners in operation across the county. In striving for improvements and efficiency savings, the directorate required a system that could be easily implemented across the whole organisation, improve its reporting on key performance indicators, as well as provide real value for money.

Liquidlogic was selected over three suppliers as it offered the best fit for purpose and value for money, and has strong experience in interfacing with other key databases, such as financial and CRM systems. The PROTOCOL platform automatically feeds in information from the ICS and eCAF systems, allowing accurate reporting from a central place regardless of location or which team last updated their caseload.

“At a time when pressures on social work staff are greater than ever, this project gives us a real opportunity to streamline our recording processes and help us make a difference to children’s lives,” said Andy Roberts, Strategic Director for Surrey County Council’s Children, Schools and Families. “We are delighted to be working with such an established provider as Liquidlogic, and we are expecting that its intuitive, centralised system will enable our frontline staff to work much more efficiently and deliver an even better quality of care.”

Denise Harrison, Sales and Marketing Director, Liquidlogic, said: “Councils are under increasing pressure to meet key performance indicators to modernise their health and social care systems. As a leader in the children’s services market, Liquidlogic can draw upon its experience to build dedicated ICS systems that enable councils to meet these and ensure the best quality of care is being delivered. Surrey is dedicated to improving the working lives of its practitioners and positively impacting on the experiences and outcomes of children and young people, and we look forward to working closely with them to achieve this.”

The ICS implementation will be phased, with phase one completed by August 2010 and phase two completed by December 2010.

In continuing support of Surrey’s objectives to streamline recording processes and achieve greater efficiencies that will make a positive difference to children’s lives in their care, the council plans to link its financial system to service planning to inform them about its spending, commissioning and unmet needs.

Surrey is also keen to use this opportunity as a springboard to joining up with additional systems and processes, such as ContactPoint.

31/03/10