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March 2024

Show and Tell

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LOTI funded Adult Social Care digital holistic view prototype

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LOTI ‘New Service Models in Adult Social Care Fund’

In March 2023, LOTI announced a fund making £200k available to boroughs to design and test new and innovative approaches to addressing Adult Social Care needs.

      • In April 2023, The London Boroughs of Hounslow, Brent and Social Finance, a not-for-profit consultancy, commenced a project to prototype the deployment of Social Finance’s ‘Family Context’ tool in the adult social care space
      • This show and tell reflects over what has been achieved in the last 10 months, where our successes have been and what we have found challenging.

Social Finance

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Background and context

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Social Finance

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Project partners

Lead partners

Delivery Lead

Funder

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Project timeline

We have worked effectively as a cross-organisational team over the past 10 months

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Refining & roadmapping 

Inception

April – June 2023:

Project set up, agree ways of working and gather existing knowledge and research.

June – August 2023:

Interview frontline practitioners to understand user needs and work with Hounslow and Brent technical leads to ascertain technical viability.  

August – December 2023: Secure access to datasets identified in discovery and develop a prototype tool to test within Brent and Hounslow ASC teams

January – February 2024:

Refine the tool based on feedback from frontline users and produce a product roadmap to take the product beyond prototype.

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Targeted Discovery

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Design and Prototyping

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In a slide: Adult’s and Children’s Social Care referrals

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Cause for concern identified

Referral is sent to the local authority ‘front door’

High level triage conducted by front door

Referral is sent onto dedicated teams to work with residents

Risk is monitored, managed and escalated accordingly

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Provision of care can be disjointed where there are multiple agencies involved.

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Agencies working in siloes have little visibility of how residents interact with others. This can lead to poorer outcomes and inefficiencies such as the duplication of assessments. In addition, residents are not able to benefit from a person-centred care model because Adult Social Care staff are unable to easily access the information required to deliver this.

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Social Finance

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Defining the problem

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Phase 1: Inception

Social Finance

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Social Finance

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Social Finance

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Establishing strong project governance and management

Sprint planning

2 weekly

Stand ups

Weekly

Technical group

2 weekly

IG group

2 weekly

Project board

Monthly

Core project team

During final 2 phases

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Phase 2: Targeted Discovery

Social Finance

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Social Finance

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‘Front door’ staff

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  • Staff in the front door will triage referrals made by members of the public, their families or concerned professionals.
  • They will gather information to support an assessment, to ascertain what support the resident can be offered by the Local Authority.

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Hospital practitioners

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  • Some practitioners will work directly with patients whilst they are admitted to a hospital.
  • These will typically not be local authority staff, instead working for the hospital trust.

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Hospital Social Work team

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  • The Hospital Social Work team are local authority staff who will work with a resident when they are due to be discharged from hospital.
  • They will ensure that the care that the resident receives when discharged back into the community is suitable for their needs.

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User groups interviewed

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Our discussion guide explored four areas:

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  1. Understanding their information gathering processes when working with cases
  2. What makes these processes easier/more difficult, and what they do to get around the difficult bits
  3. What their understanding of consent, information governance and the legal basis they have to exchange/access information
  4. Developing a prioritised list of information they most acutely want to see in a Family Context style tool 

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Our interviews

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Social Finance

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LA internal datasets

Adult’s Social Care

Children’s Social Care

Housing

External datasets

Community health services

Acute datasets, specifically recent hospital discharge

Primary datasets, specifically GP registration

Mental health and dementia services

Next of kin information across services

NHS No

High priority datasets

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Phase 3: Design and Prototyping

Social Finance

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Social Finance

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Social Finance

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Tool demo

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Phase 4: Refining and roadmapping

Social Finance

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Social Finance

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Our final outputs

Product roadmap

Strategic paper

Toolkit

For Hounslow/Brent

For LOTI

For other boroughs

Recommendations from testing, and practical checklists to take the product beyond prototype

A paper outlining the strategic landscape in which the project has operated with options for scale

A toolkit for boroughs wishing to emulate our approach to technical implementation, research and info sharing

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Social Finance

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Feedback from testing

“I was looking at the link you sent before I got on the call and I thought ‘wow, excellent’”

“I’m moving through the screens in a really fluid way, I understand where I’m meant to be going, and if there’s anyone who would find it difficult it would be me!”

“From our perspective any additional information is useful, as long as you can lay your eyes on it easily and it’s up to date”

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Project reflections

Social Finance

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Social Finance

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Brent provided a good learning opportunity to understand how the Family Context tool might be deployed in a local authority where they had a data lake in place.

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Highlights include:

  • Presentation at the Brent Data Ethics board, which provided ethical scrutiny to the tool from industry experts, academics and senior leadership in Brent. This feedback led to the amendment of some functionality and decisions about how to structure/display data.
  • Use case confirmed with Brent practitioners, with positive feedback around how the tool would support processes.

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Social Finance

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Where are things in Brent

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Hounslow now have a functioning prototype in place, with agreement for the release of internal datasets to support the tool. Conversations are underway to explore what would be needed to move from prototype to operational tool. Conversations are continuing with external partners, with IG documentation being shared.

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Highlights include:

  • Upskilling of key technical staff within Hounslow to launch the prototype, moving their data strategy forward.
  • Strengthening of relationship with external partners, using project approaches to achieve related outcomes.

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Social Finance

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Where are things in Hounslow

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Social Finance

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Our strengths

  1. Taking a user centred design approach to product development has resulted in a more usable, intuitive tool
  2. Engagement and involvement from LOTI expertise throughout
  3. Strong project management led to effective cross-organisational working
  4. Positive outcomes beyond initial project scope

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Social Finance

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Our challenges

  1. Achieving the sharing of identifiable health data
  2. A mismatch in the pace of working
  3. Unexpected project events hampering progress
  4. Technical upskilling needed

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Any questions

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Mark.Edmunds@hounslow.gov.uk

Ibrahim.Fahiye@brent.gov.uk

harry.angus@socialfinance.org.uk

Genta.hajri@loti.london

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