Overview

Surrey is a county in South East England, and one of the home counties. With a population of 1.1 million, Surrey is the third-most-populous county in the South East.

New Ways of Working

The demand for social care continues to rise, whilst budgets are stretched. This, in turn, requires Councils to seek innovations in the way that they deliver services. The Council wanted to find ways of concentrating social workers' time on those most in need and reduce the amount of time spent on assessments and providing information to those who were eager to manage their own care. To enable this self-service, they implemented the Liquidlogic Autonomy portal suite.

Process

Liquidlogic Autonomy is accessed via the Council’s website and in the first instance, it provides the opportunity for adults and carers to complete a short checklist to give an initial indication of likely eligibility for support from Adult Social Care.

The checklist takes around ten minutes to complete and will guide people to find the care and support they need online. If, after completion of the checklist, it appears that the person may benefit from support from the Council they can submit their information into the Liquidlogic case management system, saving time for Surrey’s Adult Social Care Team in inputting data. They are also encouraged to sign up for an account.

The account enables a person to submit a full Care Act compliant assessment to the Liquidlogic Adult Social Care System (LAS). The completed assessment is transferred automatically. Speaking about this approach, Toni Carney, Head of Resources, Adult Social Care at Surrey County Council comments:

"An additional benefit of this approach is that the information within the Liquidlogic case management system (LAS) reflects the person’s circumstances in their own words. The assessment is briefly checked for completeness by the Adults’ Contact Centre Team and is passed to the relevant locality team for processing when complete. At this stage, there are no plans to provide services on the back of an online assessment, a visit by a social practitioner will still be required but the practitioner will be informed about the needs of the individual in advance of the visit.

At the end of the short checklist stage, the tools are designed to signpost the person to tailored information to meet their needs. This information will help those who wish to source their own support in advance of any decision by the Council and will also help those who wish to self-fund their care and support.

An important part of the assessment process is the financial assessment. At any stage, the adult or their family/financial advocate can complete a financial assessment on behalf of the individual to calculate the amount of any contribution."

Launch

Surrey County Council took the decision to carry out a soft launch to check that processes and the technology worked as planned. As soon as this was deemed a success, the Council ran a multi-channel campaign including radio, outdoor and digital advertising to promote the tools.

Results

Toni Carney concludes: "Despite it being early days, we can see that people are using the Autonomy portals to good effect and sourcing information and advice early on as part of the process. During the publicity campaign, we had 792 new users in the first week of February, this led to 6 financial assessments, 9 Adults assessments, and 1 carer assessment in one week. Since go-live we have had over 100 full adult assessments, which suggests people like the tools and find them easy to use.

The Council has now begun to analyse the use of the Autonomy portals in more detail and track the point at which people decide not to continue with the process."

Benefits

• There is a reduction in contacts to the Council as people can find the support they need online

• For those who do need Council support, information is automatically transferred into the case management system

• Assessments are inputted by the adult/carer and in their own words

• Enables a focus of resources on the most vulnerable

Contact us for further details about the Autonomy suite or speak to your Account Manager.

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