Reducing delays in children's social care

Staff spent over 40% of their time reading/writing case notes

Early shadowing of frontline staff revealed that they spent a significant portion of their time simply writing up or reading case notes. This often involved repetitive writing/rewriting of information as well as spending a lot of time finding information about specific children/young people. This was due to information being recorded in word documents instead of using the case management system to record information in ways that could be tracked or searched more easily.

Children and families often experienced delays over a month

As a result of limited staff time as well as a lack of visibility over their cases, some children and families experienced delays of over a month in receiving the necessary reviews over their cases that could mean better pathways for care, such as receiving foster care or special guardianship orders for children in residential homes.

System overhaul to reduce repetitive tasks

As there was already an existing case management software, in order to reduce the friction that comes with changing existing service processes, I focussed on identifying changes to the existing software that could reduce the workload for staff and free up time for staff. Crucially, this meant making system changes that allowed case notes and information previously tracked in a word document to be integrated directly into the software. This reduced the time staff would have to spend rewriting and/or searching for existing case notes as the software allowed better tracking.

Providing staff with the right information at the right time

On top of integrating case information into the case management software, this would facilitate the ability to develop a tool that could summarise and provide insights into a frontline staff's current cases. Previously, information was buried in different links but our focus was to reduce the cognitive load on frontline staff to allow them to make quicker, informed decisions into their priority actions each day. This involved design workshops with frontline staff focussing on the type of information they were interested in seeing that would allow them to make informed decisions about key activities and priorities. This was iterated and tested through developing a low-fidelity version in Excel before handing the design over to my colleagues to be implemented in high-fidelity through PowerBI.

Reduction in delays by 10%

Off the back of the design work, we observed a reduction in delays by 10% sustained over the period of a year, with children receiving the necessary assessments and reviews in a timely manner.

This was one of my earliest service design projects and I was able to learn a lot not only about working in service design, but also in the public sector. One of the aspects I noted was the difficulty in working with a large service with many frontline staff with limited time and differing user experiences. One of my key focusses had to be on identifying key themes, without getting too influenced by any single opinion and therefore losing sight of the overall staff experience.