Initiatives in Care Ltd

Digital Social Work in England – October 2020

Without a doubt, the remainder of 2020 and for some time thereafter will present another period of substantial challenge in social care, both in adults and children’s services. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic combined with increasing demands, massive budget pressures and workforce/resource challenges creates a climate of uncertainty that shows little sign of easing in the foreseeable future. The opportunities for effectively managing change and creating associated ‘room for manoeuvre’ are becoming more elusive to meet these difficulties, but one of the few remaining ‘tools in the box’ is better utilisation of systems and technology.

A positive change in business practice in this pandemic has been the rapid and successful implementation of remote working solutions like Microsoft Teams. Alongside this, accessing Local Authority (LA) case management systems remotely has also been relatively straightforward. Remarkably, some LAs have even implemented new case management solutions mid pandemic in this ‘working from home’ environment; with successful systems configuration, user acceptance testing, data migration, user training and actual go lives all being achieved.

In terms of what exists today with social care IT, there are millions of service users and families supported through case management systems, thousands of professional and administrative staff engaged in using them and billions of pounds of financial transactions.

However, in most cases, these systems are not managed as a strategic asset by LAs and thus opportunities for enabling service innovation are being missed. In short, in most LAs there is an opportunity to extract more value from their IT assets.

This report builds upon the findings published in March 2018 and describes the progress in social care IT in England since then and and beyond this pandemic period. The report updates supplier market share data and comments on the supplier landscape. It has also added some new elements to help encourage the debate on social care IT.

Download a PDF of the report by clicking here>

The Pandemic Experience IT Survey – September 2020

To try and get a better understanding of the key IT issues that the service currently faces during the Covid-19 pandemic, a series of interviews were undertaken with senior managers in the service, senior IT managers, sector based independent consultants and the main IT suppliers. The key findings are described in abridged form in the report below.

Download a PDF of the report by clicking here>