Adults' & children's services

The new vision of integrated adults’ and children’s services offers the prospect of a deeper understanding of patterns of need, leading to better services and improved outcomes throughout people’s lives. Measures such as The Children Act 2004 facilitate this person-centred approach by shifting the focus of attention from the provision of discrete services towards individuals and their changing needs as they journey through life.

In Blueprint’s experience, local authorities have found it easier to make the necessary institutional and personnel changes than they have to integrate information flows across former directorates. But arguably, it is just as important to break down the boundaries that restrict flows of information as is to rebrand directorates and redefine roles. Social care professionals know they need to integrate information that was previously held in ‘silos’ (consistent with data protection), in order to turn the vision into reality.

At Blueprint, we have a great deal of experience linking information systems across entire organisations and of working in the social care arena. We are also helping our local authority customers to respond sensitively to the growing pressure to do more for less. Our management information systems help them link investment to outcomes, so they can set priorities intelligently and make reasoned arguments for expenditure in areas where they know it will have the greatest impact.

Among the areas in which we are active in the field of adults’ and children’s services are:

1. Understanding needs: ‘Our communities are increasingly diverse, with an ageing cohort at one end and a baby boom at the other. We want to create scenarios to test the impact of those changes in five, ten and twenty years’ time.’
2. The assessment and review process: ‘We need to move beyond responding reactively to requests for support. I want us to stop seeing a guy who thinks he just needs a hand rail and start seeing a person whose needs are probably going to multiply.’
3. Finance and strategic planning: ‘I want a financial planning system that links our predictions about future patterns of need with the cost of providing those services. It should be granular enough to produce a life-cycle cost for each category of individual.’
4. Service choices and outcomes: ‘What is best practice? We know that members of our team implement different solutions for the same problem. It would be useful to compare outcomes and study what happens when we use our resources in different ways’.
5. A single view of the customer: ‘How can we improve life chances for looked-after children? We want to bring together information about social care interventions, health records and educational progress so that we can study linkages and spot common factors.’