Ekta Mehta, Author at CACI

What can ICSs learn from the pandemic?

Posted on: 24 January 2023

One of the few bright spots of the Covid-19 pandemic was the response we saw from society and its services. The NHS and health services in particular were placed under great strain, having to reconfigure, almost overnight, how vital health services would be maintained, how Covid patients would be treated and how staff would be kept safe. The NHS rose to the challenge, giving cause for optimism around the implementation of integrated care services (ICSs).

ICSs will bring about changes in IT and software infrastructure, namely in the way that services are aligned and data is shared. The aim is to provide a more joined-up patient care experience whilst also equipping each service within an ICS with the information that they need on a patient. This will reduce duplication of work, driving efficiency through the care ecosystem.

As ever, theory and practice can remain divergent from one another, so getting each facet of an ICS to become interoperable with the rest of the services will be a challenge. The pandemic, however, shows that interoperable services can be achieved.

Why is the pandemic relevant?

With society closing down, hospital admissions spiking and other care services suffering from the knock-on affect of the redistribution of professionals and services, health services changed dramatically in a breathlessly short space of time.

PPE had to be provided to frontline workers. Beds had to be made available to Covid patients. Super hospitals were built in London and Birmingham, although thankfully weren’t needed.

Then there was the rapid response of producing a vaccine. That vaccine then needed administering on a basis of vulnerability. The elderly and unwell were vaccinated first, then the rest of society in descending age brackets.

Village halls were turned into testing and vaccination centres. A whole new technological ecosystem had to be created to record the administration of vaccines and note how many cases were being experienced. From testing to vaccines to deployment, the response was immediate and brilliantly executed for the most part. When the chips were down, health services responded.

How can ICSs learn from this?

The rapid redeployment of resources, as well as the creation and implementation of a technology ecosystem to record outcomes was impressive. Health services can respond at short notice to new challenges.

The roll out of ICSs isn’t nearly so dramatic. There is planning and oversight in place, but it will result in changes to the way data is recorded and shared. Change isn’t always something that we embrace, but the sentiment of improving and enhancing the delivery of care services can only be a good thing.

We’ve also seen that the way in which we approach healthcare has changed. Phone and video appointments are now more commonplace, creating efficiency in the process. Vaccines are still being rolled out to combat Covid, a reminder of the pace of change and how it has altered the healthcare landscape.

Change can be embraced and implemented quickly. The pandemic has shown us that. It’s one of the few positives to emerge from the episode.

How can technology help?

Technology is fundamental to how ICSs go about meeting the challenge of creating interoperable services (something we explored in more detail here). The response to handling Covid test results and the roll out of the vaccine required intelligent use of technology to underpin the process. It also kept other services moving, with the switch to video calls and so forth for routine appointments. The upheaval in staff schedules also required a systems response to manage it.

Technology can be sourced and implemented quickly. With the drive to data sharing, other aspects such as data regulations must also be considered, so the main challenge is selecting the right partner for the needs of your services. The needs of each facet of an ICS are bespoke, so a technology solution that fits your requirements is paramount, to ensure that data is utilised your way and that rules are adhered to.

It’s inconceivable that a single technology system would be appropriate across an entire ICS, so selecting the right technology is important. It will, however, need to support the wider aims of the ICS in creating knowledge and information sharing across services.

Conclusion

Technology will be vital to the success of ICSs, as it was to the response to the pandemic and the ongoing vaccine rollout. As we start to emerge from the shadow of the pandemic, there is a cost to be realised by our health services of the necessary response to it.

Many routine appointments and surgeries were delayed and delayed. There is a backlog of tasks that must now be tackled. Out of the frying pan and into the fire? It is certainly a major challenge across health services but far from an insurmountable one.

The aims of ICSs, in creating a joined-up health service which thrives amid mutual knowledge sharing and understanding, will create the necessary efficiencies in process to combat these delays.

There are positive lessons in the healthcare sector to be gleaned from the pandemic. The pooling of resources and talents kept health services afloat at a time of previously unimaginable strain. Putting those lessons and experiences to effective use will stand ICSs in good stead.

We explore how ICSs drive improved patient experiences and outcomes in our latest white paper, Integrated care systems and the role of technology to support patients across the UK. You can download your free copy here.

How interoperability will be vital across ICSs

Posted on: 17 January 2023

The aim of integrated care systems (ICSs) is to bring together the healthcare operations within an area to consolidate and improve the patient experience and outcomes. This, clearly, is a major undertaking, bringing disparate facets of the healthcare industry together in order to improve services. The aim is a simple one; achieving it will require a lot of hard work and common understanding. This blog takes a closer look at how interoperability – of systems, staff and functions – will support ICSs in achieving their intended aims.

The NHS Long Term Plan states that, “ICSs bring together local organisations in a pragmatic and practical way to deliver the ‘triple integration’ of primary and specialist care, physical and mental health services, and health with social care. They will have a key role in working with Local Authorities at ‘place’ level, and through ICSs, commissioners will make shared decisions with providers on population health, service redesign and Long Term Plan implementation.”

In order for ICSs to achieve this, the use of technology within them needs to be well thought out. Whilst it’s not essential that every facet of an ICS is using the same technology provider, it will be essential that the technology they each use is capable of being interoperable with the other systems deployed across the ICS.

What is interoperability?

Starting with the basic question, this is something that NHS England has outlined in its vision of creating more efficient and effective healthcare solutions: “With new models of care emerging and evolving, there is a clear need for more effective information sharing between care settings, organisations and geographies, as well as between professionals and citizens, to optimise patient outcomes and quality of care. This is reliant on the ability of IT systems across health and care to be interoperable with one another and is key to the delivery of the future vision of care in England.”

How can interoperability be achieved?

This is reliant upon the technology ecosystem within an ICS. It is not reliant upon everyone using the same system, rather that everyone is using a system that can be integrated with the other systems being used across an ICS. Most modern systems operate with an application programming interface (API), meaning that they can be configured to send and receive data from other systems according to the specific rules required around data sharing. A basic of example of this is being able to use your Facebook login details to login to other services – your data is shared between Facebook and the other service, meaning that you don’t have to spend time registering and inputting details.

Data can either be sent to a central data repository, to then be appropriately managed by other facets of the ICS, or direct system-to-system integrations can be established. The former provides a central view of all activities, whereas the latter establishes real-time data sharing between two or more entities directly.

It sounds simple in theory, but interoperability is only as good as the technology supporting it.

Siloed data

ICSs aim to break down data siloes. For example, if a patient has visited their GP and the GP surgery has no means of sharing this data with any other point of healthcare provision that the patient might interact with, then that data is useful to that GP surgery and that GP surgery only.

This works to the detriment of the patient’s healthcare experience, since they will have to duplicate their effort in explaining any problems to the next service, whilst that service will have no oversight of the issues faced by the patient. This is an extreme example and doesn’t exist in practice, thankfully, but serves to highlight the issues with data becoming siloed within specific sections of the healthcare service.

Away from frontline NHS services such as GPs and hospitals, however, there are significant hurdles to interoperability across all ICS activities. The National Care Forum (NCF) notes that, “The government aims to have shared care records in place for everyone by 2024. Only 40% of social care providers have fully digitised records and there is no detailed plan to bridge that gap.”

How can the 60% of social care providers that are reliant upon pen, paper and filing cabinets for recording patient activities share this information with other facets of the ICS within which they operate?

Interoperability is only as good as the technology supporting it

This presents a significant issue in achieving interoperability across an ICS. Manual records cannot be shared into a data repository nor directly with another provider. The data in these social care providers is siloed and inaccessible outside of the individual organisation. It is, therefore, unknown to other healthcare providers and hampers progress towards achieving the goals of ICSs.

It’s not all bad news, though. There is an opportunity for social care providers to be guided as to how best to implement technology for both themselves and the wider ICS. It is also possible for them to leverage the technological investment of others.

Budgets are always a hot topic of conversation. With an impending cost of living crisis looming, soaring energy bills and no clear direction coming from government, it is unlikely that social care providers currently operating without technology systems to record patient care and activities will suddenly find the cash down the back of the sofa to fund it.

It’s also unlikely that this will be top of their priority list, especially as “there is no detailed plan to bridge that gap.”

The ability to open up technology systems internally will help. If licences from a system already invested in within an ICS can be made available elsewhere, this will help to not only implement the requisite interoperability, but also to manage costs more efficiently and effectively.

This will then help those facets of an ICS such as social care providers who are not currently utilising technology, and are therefore holding siloed data, to open their data up to the benefit of the ICS. It will also help them in realising efficiencies across their own processes – removing the reliance on manual methods of recording data will facilitate staff being able to focus more of their time on patient care.

Conclusion

Interoperability will open the door to delivering the ‘triple integration’ of primary and specialist care, physical and mental health services, and health with social care. It will be the bedrock of the interaction between them, enabling data to be shared seamlessly for the benefit of the health service and its patients.

There are many health specific technology solutions available to the market, so working with providers that support interoperability is crucial for each facet of an ICS. Understanding how your data can be shared and working with your provider(s) on this will help in meeting the central aims of an ICS.

Most modern solutions will support interoperability, but it’s crucial that they can work and integrate with multiple solutions. It’s inconceivable that every facet of an ICS would be using the same technology solution, so this point is paramount. Working with the technology that’s the best fit for your area of the ICS, whilst at the same time making the data that you generate available to the other areas of the ICS that need it to enhance their services, is the fundamental aim.

We explore the subject of interoperability, as well as a number of other areas where technology will play a fundamental role in the success of ICSs in our recent white paper, Integrated care systems and the role of technology to support patients across the UK. You can download your free copy here.

The importance of change management in project delivery

Posted on: 9 January 2023

People don’t inherently like change. We don’t trust it. We take comfort in the familiar and generally respond well to routine. That’s how we train ourselves. So, when well established processes in our lives are altered, resistance is a natural state of mind. This is something we’ve seen a lot of inside our own company, let alone with customers.

When implementing our Cygnum software with and for customers, change management is one of the key aspects that we focus on at the outset. Forming a guiding principle behind our proprietary FUSION delivery methodology, change management is something that we work closely with our customers on to ensure that those affected by the project – affected by change – have robust, accurate and timely oversight of what it means to them, as well as having people in place that they can talk to.

The role of people in change management

Having a direct line of contact in the form of project sponsors is vital in achieving effective change management. Project sponsors form the public face of the new solution being implemented within your organisation, acting as focal points and keeping lines of communication open at all levels. They will know the project inside out, being vocal about its benefits and explaining to those affected what it means for them.

It is the responsibility of other senior members of the project team to get involved in the change management process, too. People managers must be passionate advocates of the project and its outcomes, being able to convey these to staff impacted by the changes and help them in realising the benefits. A change practitioner helps at every level of the project to facilitate change and enable others within the project to have fair oversight of the changes and what they need to do in order to facilitate them. Then there’s the project manager, who assumes ultimate responsibility for the benefits of the project being realised – it’s crucial that the project manager ensures that communications and training are covered with those who will be impacted by it.

How CACI helps in your change management process

With the benefit of the combined experience of thousands of projects, our team of experts is trained to help every step of the way. As outlined in our FUSION methodology, we work with our customers to create a clear, achievable and structured path to project success. Even within that, however, change is always around the corner!

If things always went as we would like and expect, project management would be the easiest job in the world. But it doesn’t and, alas, it’s not. Having seen a wide variety of situations and circumstances, from the well structured to the less so, we help you to shape the project. This gives us both the best chance of achieving success.

Often there is a disconnect between procurement, management and those who will be utilising the software. Bridging these gaps is the ultimate aim of change management.

By following our FUSION methodology from the outset, we can establish clear outcomes and timelines, thereby helping you to communicate with your relevant teams and colleagues.

Change management underpins project success

The point of all projects is to implement some form of change. If everything was working harmoniously, efficiently and cost effectively, there would be no need to undertake the project in the first place. And no one wants to spend time, money and effort on implementing change unless it will bring about tangible benefits to the organisation.

Getting to the root of this sits at the heart of change management. A clearly defined project, with achievable timelines and outcomes, is far easier to sell to a team than a vague concept of success.

We’ve put together more detail on the change management process in this brochure. It outlines the five key aspects of change, the importance of people and communication throughout a project in order to manage the changes being implemented, how change management is fundamental to project success and an outline of effective change management.

Hopefully this offers some insight into the change management process and how you can consider change management in your next project.

The SEND review and reshaping EHCPs

Posted on: 16 December 2022

One of the suggestions of the recent SEND review was to overhaul EHCPs. We take a look at how this can be done and what it will mean

The Department for Education (DfE) commissioned the SEND Review in 2019. The aim of this review was to explore the challenges faced by children and their families with identified special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). In March 2022, after much consultation, a green paper was published which puts forward several suggestions as to how the SEND process can be better administered to improve efficiency and, ultimately, improve outcomes for those children and their families. In amongst the plethora of suggestion sits one around EHCPs (education, health and care plans). I wanted to use this blog to explore this area specifically, since the response to the DfE’s suggestions is already available to schools, children, their families and local authorities.

What does the DfE want to do with EHCPs?

In short, the DfE wants to streamline EHCPs. As things stand, there is a loose outline for EHCPs but the level of detail within them is at local discretion. This has resulted in inconsistencies at local and national levels, leading to inconsistent responses to them. This is particularly acute where professionals work across two localities: getting to grips with two interpretations of EHCPs takes time and increases the manual, administrative burden upon professionals.

As the SEND green paper notes; “There were inconsistences in the structure, length and formatting of EHCP forms, with the samples included in the analysis ranging from a maximum of 40 pages in one local authority to between 8 and 23 in another. The EHCPs produced by the local authorities in the sample would take approximately 50 minutes on average to read aloud to a child. This lack of consistency means that partners who work across multiple local authorities must navigate multiple processes and templates, reducing their capacity to deliver support and adding to their administrative burden… We therefore propose to introduce standardised EHCP templates and processes.”

Sounds sensible, how will it work in practice?

The central hook upon which EHCPs will be hung going forward will be via a template provided by the DfE. This will standardise the information captured and make it easier for professionals to traverse each EHCP, simplifying the interpretation of the information within them and making it easier to input appropriately into each child’s journey.

Another rule that the DfE is seeking to implement around EHCPs is that any changes to them will need to be signed off by the parents of the child. Their increased involvement is seen as central to the success of the SEND process going forward.

The fundamental change to the management and administration of EHCPs is that the DfE is looking to fully digitise them. This means that they will only be accessible digitally. This will make the process much more efficient and transparent, since each EHCP will have a fully auditable trail of activities and inputs. This will make interpreting each EHCP much quicker, too, since a complete record of professional and parental input will be visible to schools, professionals and parents.

Creating a central record will enable for greater control, ease of access and interpretation of data for everyone concerned. Children with identified SEND necessarily find themselves in a multi-agency scenario, so tying their record together digitally makes interpreting and understanding their journey easier.

This also makes the information pertaining to a child’s SEND status useful beyond the boundaries of education. For example, in a youth justice scenario, it’s useful for practitioners to have a complete view of the young people within their services. Having information on their SEND can be informative in painting a complete picture of their journey and understanding their life story.

Technology supporting the single view

In creating a fully digital EHCP, there is a tacit acknowledgement of the involvement of technology. The vast majority of schools, local authorities, parents and professionals have the ability to access and record information digitally. How the DfE will implement this will be the interesting point.

A number of different technology solutions exist across the education industry, so there’s no chance of every authority and school deploying the same software. Nor should there be. Each school and authority should be free to select the technology and partners that work best for them.

Where the DfE will need they systems to work for them is in regards of interoperability. How can the information in an EHCP be shared between systems in multi-agency scenarios?

Most systems support this, with the ability to establish the set of data fields that will be outlined by the DfE and can communicate with third party systems to send and receive information. This will be vital in achieving the SEND aims of the DfE for EHCPs.

Conclusion

Achieving this single view of a child is something that we fully support, and our recent white paper covers the topic across children’s services more broadly. In multi-agency scenarios, such as those presented by SEND, it is imperative that all parties can access and record information unilaterally whilst contributing to the ultimate goal of improved outcomes for children with SEND.

A standardised response to SEND and EHCPs will also make the entire process more transparent, without local interpretations causing issues for children moving schools, region or for professionals picking up disparate cases. The response to SEND should not depend upon where you live and the process should be transparent and consistent for everyone.

As a technology provider in the education sector, we have long seen the benefit of interoperability with third party software providers in the sector. The ability to send and receive data seamlessly creates efficiencies in the process that will be to the ultimate benefit of the end service user, in this case children with identified SEND.

Creating a rich, single view of every child can only be beneficial in data mapping, understanding behaviours and tackling the challenge of improving outcomes for all children. We too often see information, systems and processes siloed into regions and sectors, so the aims of the DfE are welcome in tackling this. Education is a right for all children and young people, ensuring that the process is open, fair and easy to understand makes it a lot easier for everyone.

Creating a single view of the SEND journey is an important step. Making their information available to the multiple agencies that interact with SEND children, will only enhance the ability of each agency to interpret and record data on them, sharing their professional insights with others involved in their journey.

Effectively planning and scheduling district nursing across the NHS

Posted on: 1 December 2022

Like so many industries and bodies, the NHS had to adapt in several ways during the Covid pandemic. The frontline of its efforts to tackle the virus made the headlines, but away from Covid wards there was a necessity for the NHS to adapt its processes and practices around the threat posed. One such example regards district nursing – how was the NHS able to effectively and efficiently plan and schedule its nursing workforce in the face of meeting the challenge of delivering vital services away from hospitals?

In short, there was something of a struggle across some NHS Trusts to meet this challenge. The usual routine of bringing vulnerable patients into the hospital environment for the administration of care had to be reviewed in order to reduce the risk of exposure to Covid for such patients. This meant putting more nurses out on the road to deliver care in residences and care homes. This change also fulfils part of the NHS’s Long Term Plan: “Over the next 10 years, health and care will change significantly. We have a roadmap in the NHS Long Term Plan which sets out a new service model for the 21st century: increasing care in the community; redesigning and reducing pressure on emergency hospital services; more personalised care; digitally enabled primary and outpatient care; and a focus on population health and reducing health inequalities.”

There was a sudden increase in demand for domestic patient visits thrust upon NHS Trusts with the Covid pandemic, meaning that processes and protocols had to be drawn up and adhered to in a short space of time. The process of planning and scheduling district nurses to carry out these additional tasks meant that a vast number of clinical hours had to be diverted to scheduling and planning. On top of that, there was the inevitable rescheduling of appointments to contend with, too.

This is a largely manual process at present for many NHS Trusts, with others relying on old software which isn’t suitable for handling the modern scheduling demands of district nursing. Operating hundreds of nurses to fulfil thousands of appointments in an efficient and effective manner is a huge undertaking. Doing this manually requires a monumental effort on the part of those responsible and using outdated software only makes the challenge harder.

Furthermore, each appointment must also take into consideration the skillset of the nurse conducting the appointment, ensuring that they are appropriately qualified to undertake the task. This requires careful planning and oversight and was a process that could be shattered in an instant with a positive Covid test for a district nurse. Operating this manually, simply put, is unsustainable given the hours being diverted to it, the strain of efficiently managing the workloads of every district nurse and the requirement to consider each nurse’s competency for each visit. So, there is an opportunity to implement new technological systems which will bring about lasting benefits – the healthcare world will be a different place even once Covid is a memory.

Automated planning and scheduling software can bring about a multitude of benefits for NHS district nursing including:

Reducing the clinical time spent on scheduling appointments – automating the process massively reduces the workload, leaving administrative time to focus on exceptions
Reducing travel time and expenditure – efficiently scheduling district nurses to maximise the number of appointments they can fulfil reduces the burden on the Trust by ensuring each nurse is fulfilling as many appointments as possible
Enabling demand and capacity modelling – identifying demand gaps and knowing exactly how many district nurses are required at any given time based on actual demand
Supporting the identification of skill gaps – spotting skill shortages based on future demand means a proactive and accurate approach to future workforce training and recruitment can be adopted
Meeting Lone Working Policy requirements – where staff are working alone there is the potential for them to face hostile situations; having a robust system in place enables them to raise an alarm where such scenarios arise
Increasing assurance that service delivery is meeting the requirements and needs of patient demand – reports can be generated to see the effectiveness of service delivery and to identify any shortfalls in staffing required to deliver services in line with patient demand
Reduction in missed or delayed visits (and associated clinical incidents) – by efficiently planning rosters, travel time allowances can be factored in, lowering the risk of external factors disrupting your schedule and making it more likely that appointments are met, reducing the risk of clinical incidents occurring as a result of staff scheduling
Improved communications with patients and carers regarding visits – automate messaging through your system to inform patients and guide nurses

All these benefits from a system can be used to shape a more consistent and reliable future for NHS Trusts in delivering vital services. CACI works across the UK with community care teams who use our Cygnum software to help deliver a huge range of centrally and domestically located services, helping to keep vital care and community services running. The software is also used by the Care Quality Commission to schedule their inspection workforce.

Cost of living crisis and vulnerable young people

Posted on: 29 November 2022

The cost of living crisis is impacting the vast majority of people in the UK. Inevitably, however, the worst effects will be experienced by the poorest and most vulnerable members of society. This has potentially dire consequences for children and their families who fall into that bracket. At the height of the Covid pandemic, Marcus Rashford was the public face of feeding hungry children; now reports are emerging about the children of families who don’t qualify for free school meals.

As everyday bills for basic items such as food and energy surge, it is forcing an increasing number of families into poverty. This has far reaching consequences for society. Domestic abuse is expected to rise, since it will become increasingly difficult for people to flee such situations and go it alone; instead they will be trapped in horrifying circumstances simply in order to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Where there are children involved in such family units, childhood trauma will increase, too. Who will be left to deal with this? Education, social and youth justice workers, many of whom themselves will be left in a precarious position by the cost of living crisis.

There have been several reports in the press about children going hungry at school. “Headteachers said that the group causing them “most alarm” are not children from the very poorest families, but the layer just above that who do not qualify for free school meals and risk going a whole day without food or with wholly inadequate lunches,” said one prominent report in The Evening Standard.

More families forced in poverty and the impact on children

There are practical concerns around the cost of living crisis for children in and around the poverty line. Children with identified special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are far more likely to come from low income households. Some 37.2% of children who have identified SEND qualify for free school meals. 19.7% of pupils without SEND qualify.

Taking this further, 56.2% of looked after children (LAC) have identified SEND. The most common type of need for LAC is ‘social, emotional and mental health.’

In 2021, the last time statistics were published by the government on the subject, 80,850 children were LAC in England. This number steadily increases year on year, so it’s reasonable to predict that the cost of living crisis, in placing greater pressure upon families to support their children, will force many past breaking point and result in more LAC.

On top of this, 400,000 children are in the social care system. Again, in a time of social strife, it’s not unreasonable to predict a rise in this number, too.

How can our services react?

The obvious fix is money. Sadly, that’s unlikely to be forthcoming. From Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget which did so much damage to the short term outlook of the UK economy, to current prime minister, Rishi Sunak exploring tax increases and public spending cuts, it’s clear that the government will be pursuing cuts in public spending in one form or another. A report from the Resolution Foundation economic think tank suggests that the government needs to find £40bn to rebalance the UK’s finances. Social care, youth justice and education will all be affected.

So, there won’t be any more money available to services that interact with vulnerable young people. As the report in The Evening Standard highlights, concern is now spreading away from those eligible for free school meals to those in the bracket just above them. To borrow another line from that report: “Up to 800,000 children in England live in households on universal credit that do not qualify for free school meals because their annual household earnings (excluding benefits) exceed £7,400, according to the Child Poverty Action Group. This risibly low threshold — of just £617 a month after tax — is applied by the Government irrespective of the number of children in the family and mostly impacts low-income working families.”

The social interpretation of ‘poverty’, as well as the literal one, requires redefining. That’s not something that can be achieved easily or quickly, so what can be done in the here and now?

Efficiency getting the most from available services

Efficiency is one way that services interacting with vulnerable children can, simply put, provide more services to more children. This will be vital in identifying and responding to children with SEND, as well as processing information on children such as their eligibility for free school meals and uniforms.

If staff are bogged down in administrative tasks, it impacts their ability to focus on improving outcomes for these children. What staff in children’s services are best at is helping those children achieve the best possible outcomes. If admin can be left to technology and automation, where possible, this helps to free up time.

In the case of vulnerable young people, those 400,000 in the social care system as well as those 1.49m pupils (16.5% of all pupils) with identified SEND, multiple agencies will be involved in their journey.

How can shared learnings be applied across agencies? Several expert opinions will be applied to each journey, so sharing this information across agencies will help in forming a stronger, better informed opinion of each child.

Conclusion

With inflation sky rocketing, energy bills soaring and wages failing to keep pace, there will obviously be a challenging time for many people. The links between poverty and SEND are clear, though.

So too, are the links between disadvantage and activities such as County Lines drug gangs. In desperate times, the apparent carrot of an easy way out will leave countless more young people vulnerable to these types of activity. It is estimated that as many as 50,000 young people are involved in County Lines activities across the UK. The temptation to make ‘easy money’ with such gangs will only grow with the cost of living crisis.

This is another situation where data and insight will be so important. There are various estimates as to the number of children missing education depending upon your definition of missing education, but those not accessing full time education is around the 50,000 mark. This might be coincidence, but such insight is valuable in protecting and safeguarding vulnerable young people.

As such threats increase in society, services being aware of them is a significant first step in attempting to resolve them.

The number of children in poverty will certainly increase. With that, crime will rise. Pressure on education, youth justice and social workers will increase, too. The link between poverty and SEND is apparent, creating another burden on already stretched resources.

Making the best use of the resources available is paramount. It has always been important, but never more so than now.

For more information on how technology can support local authorities, schools, parents, professionals and youth justice teams in improving outcomes for vulnerable young people, please visit our website here.

Why NHS costing systems can’t stand still

Posted on: 18 November 2022

The NHS landscape is constantly evolving – it’s the responsibility of trusted solution partners to keep pace with NHS organisations and contribute expert data knowledge to help them on their journey

Everyone’s talking about finance collaboration in the new Integrated Care System (ICS) structure, but it’s not easy for anyone to make headway in this unfamiliar landscape. It’s not as if the decks have been cleared to make time and space to understand and address the opportunity: NHS leaders and finance teams are still grappling with everyday pressures and priorities within their own Trust. ICS is another challenge to add, albeit one that offers excellent opportunities to improve patient care and experiences.

Up to now, costing data has been used by NHS Trusts for national cost collection (NCC) and internal service line reporting. Solutions like CACI’s Synergy 4 help Trusts to make this happen in the most efficient and integrated way possible and to gain greater value from their data for service design and improvement. But now, there’s a new challenge level. How can Trusts also share and embrace costing data from other Trusts within their ICS?

The rewards of understanding and analysing patient pathways across organisations

In principle, it’s clear that a holistic approach to analysing patient pathways – spanning acute, mental health, ambulance and social care organisations and community settings – has the power to greatly improve patient outcomes and experiences as well as delivering better value and efficiency to ease the burden on NHS care teams. But the practical processes and channels for sharing data and insight are far from clear.

CACI’s NHS engagement team has been working closely with our NHS clients to understand the complex considerations around sharing data between Trusts in a secure way that produces reliable and meaningful information that can help develop patient-centric services and make the most of NHS resources.

Trusts are engaging with a range of new data challenges for ICS

Information Governance (IG) for shared data is a key concern for NHS finance teams. Data must be anonymised, in order to protect patient confidentiality, but Trusts must be able to match patient identifiers to understand the end-to-end pathway through multiple touchpoints and organisations.

Finance teams are also keen to understand more about the quality of data that could be shared by other Trusts. Data formats may be an issue: there are multiple systems and data sources in use, even within individual Trusts, which can make it hard to match data and adopt a holistic approach. With clinical decisions and budget allocation potentially riding on the analysis, it’s critically important that pooled data is accurate, de-duplicated and in comparable formats, to avoid inaccuracies. Reporting on insight from shared data can produce unfamiliar results in the broader ICS context: for NHS leaders to trust the integrity of the data and analysis, these results need to be clearly presented and explained.

These are uncharted waters for NHS Trusts, for the new ICS organisations and for data solution partners like CACI. It’s not surprising that most efforts to launch costing data-sharing projects have so far been tentative. We’ve talked to finance managers who have shared data to explore the opportunity – generally they’ve done this in manual and fragmented ways, such as emailing manually created data files. This is clearly not a scalable approach for time-poor NHS finance teams, even if the attendant data protection and security issues could be resolved.

Operational finance teams can see the potential, but many are worried about IG, concerned about undermining their own Trust’s financial priorities within the ICS and don’t have the time or the mandate to focus on unpacking the issues. It’s already creating frustration. Some NHS leaders have a management accountancy background: they don’t yet have the data literacy training or experience to champion or direct a completely new costing data-sharing approach with confidence. This is a challenge we’ve also recognised: CACI’s Healthcare Insight Success Cycle (HISC) includes data literacy training modules which can help increase knowledge and confidence.

Collaboration with solution partners can enable ICS collaboration

How can NHS Trusts and ICS organisations break down these barriers and access the resources they need to unlock the potential of data-sharing? Partners like CACI can help to shoulder some of the load by ensuring that technology and data solutions are continually evolved and adapted to handle the emerging opportunities and challenges. Driven by the feedback and hands-on experience we gain from our NHS colleagues, we’re working on our Synergy proposition to develop the data-sharing, analytics and IG capabilities that will support the emerging ICS data-sharing requirement.

We know that ICS organisations are at different stages of their thinking about Trusts. They also have diverse levels of capability, resources and experience in producing Trust-level service insight from costing data. Everyone has a different starting point for their new ICS data-sharing journey.

How does your Trust’s approach and experience to date match up with our current understanding of the ICS landscape? At CACI, we’re highly aware that priorities, issues and opportunities are constantly evolving within the NHS. We’re rising to the challenge of delivering a costing proposition that’s built for the complex demands of today and tomorrow, supporting better outcomes for patients, better decision information for clinicians and better use of resources for the NHS. We want to support Trust finance and analytics teams by sharing our NHS data knowledge to help build data literacy among NHS leaders, so they can champion ICS from a position of understanding.

That’s why we are working alongside our NHS colleagues, engaging with their current challenges and offering data strategy, process and capability insight to help them move forward on the journey, as we evolve our Synergy proposition.

Please join the conversation through our user groups and round tables or get in touch directly to share your priorities and issues and pose any questions that we could help you answer through our NHS data experience and expertise. Contact consultant Susan Brooks in CACI’s NHS team.

Cambridgeshire County Council and Peterborough City Council to support SEND services with IMPULSE Nexus

Posted on: 13 October 2022

Lucy Sweatman, Education Programme Manager for Cambridgeshire County Council and Peterborough City Council said: “We’re looking forward to working with IMPULSE Nexus. Most importantly, the new system means we can increase the quality of the service we offer to children and families, enabling both authorities to improve their SEND processes, with input from all agencies into each child’s plans and provision. It will also make the whole process more efficient, bringing everything to do with SEND into a single view. This means we will be able to help children and young people with SEND in a more collaborative way, driving and enhancing the partnership working between schools, professionals, authorities and parents. This will make the process of recording outcomes and requirements much more straightforward, enabling us to act more swiftly and efficiently.”

IMPULSE Nexus is made up of several modules, of which local authorities can use as many as they need to support their education services. Based upon an interoperable framework, IMPULSE Nexus modules can integrate with other services and providers to offer a joined-up view of each child and service.

“We’re delighted that Cambridgeshire County Council and Peterborough City Council have both chosen IMPULSE Nexus SEND solutions to support their ongoing work in this vital area,” says Phil Lucy, Director of CACI’s Children and Young Person’s division. “By providing a fully auditable trail of activities, with the ability for all stakeholders to record information, IMPULSE Nexus will help both authorities to enhance their SEND processes and provide efficient and effective support to those children needing their services.”

Nottingham City Council to use ChildView from CACI to support its youth justice work

Posted on: 5 October 2022

“We’re looking forward to getting started with ChildView and realising the benefits that it will bring for our service and the young people who we support,” says Simon Newling-Ward, service manager at Nottingham City Council Youth Justice Service. “We need a system that will support every aspect of our work. ChildView ticks this box and further enables us to share data seamlessly and fully with other youth justice teams. With young people often moving around, it is vital that we can receive accurate and complete data on them when they come under our auspices. At the same time, it’s equally important for us to be able to share the information that we have built on a young person’s journey if they move to another local authority, in order that they can continue to receive the best support possible.”

“We are delighted that Nottingham City Council has chosen to utilise ChildView across its youth justice service,” says Phil Lucy, director, CACI’s Children and Young Persons’ team. “Working with a majority of youth justice services operating in England and Wales and their major cities, I feel that our team can support Nottingham City Council’s team and we’re excited to do just that.”

The contract was awarded to CACI via the G Cloud framework.

How North Somerset Council has taken advantage of E Forms in ChildView

Posted on:

North Somerset Council has been using ChildView from CACI since 2013. As part of its drive to derive more benefit from the system, the council started using ChildView’s E Forms functionality in 2022. Designed to give ChildView customers more flexibility in creating, linking and designing reports, E Forms enables councils and those tasked with improving outcomes for vulnerable young people to gain more insight into their work. What works? What doesn’t? Building up a database around youth justice work enables councils like North Somerset to gain deeper insight and understanding of their work.

“We made the decision to purchase the E forms module following the recent demonstration of its functionality to us by CACI,” says Nicola O’Driscoll, principle business intelligence lead at North Somerset Council. “The additional functionality gives us the ability to create and add our own forms and assessments allowing North Somerset to report at a more granular level. As a result, this will aid effective targeting of resources, give greater management oversight, providing real depth and breadth of those risk and safeguarding factors that affect the children and young people we work with.”

Being more agile with the creation of forms and reporting enables youth justice workers to define the data that they need, not just work with pre-defined data capture fields. This helps teams to research into and report on areas of their work in a more flexible manner.

Getting started with ChildView’s E Forms module was easy for North Somerset.

“In terms of the training the group experience was very diverse, from being highly experienced with the application to being novices,” explains Nicola. “All participants were able to follow the training and the feedback I have been given was; “this was one of the best training sessions I have ever attended. The instructor was really clear and engaging and was able to answer every question. It was a really positive, inclusive experience. Following training there has been an incredibly high level of enthusiasm from everybody to get stuck in. Huge thanks to Carol, who was fantastic.”

The benefits of E Forms in ChildView

Create your own forms tailored to your bespoke process
Link forms together
Locally designed forms that can be reported on
Printable versions of each form

For more information on ChildView, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/software/childview/