Advertorial: Local authorities improve multi-agency response through secure sharing

Delivering a more effective welfare response

From frontline workers to specialist entities, the response to safeguarding at-risk adults and children requires collaboration across multiple organisations to deliver timely and critical services.

Lack of a secure, digital file-sharing method leaves responders open to resorting to email or paper-based means to collaborate with other organisations and stakeholders. The impact of this can result in slower response times and potential breaches of confidentiality for vulnerable members of the public.

But there are safer and more secure ways for police, social workers, education settings, non-governmental organisations, and other stakeholders involved in frontline response to collaborate.

Here, we share the experiences of two local authorities, driving change in the way they deliver support and services to victims of domestic abuse and missing children cases.

A more connected community

The Society for Innovation, Technology and Modernisation (Socitm), in partnership with Objective Connect, a secure file-sharing and collaboration platform, held an online forum for local government and other organisation members to inspire innovation for UK public sector collaboration.

The session aimed to share some of the inspiring stories from UK public sector organisations delivering positive community outcomes through secure collaboration and information sharing with external partners and agencies. This comes at a time when operating a modern working environment, including remote and hybrid working, brings its own risks around security and information governance. The Socitm session highlights can be found here.

What happens to information when I share it? Where does it go? Who has interacted with it, when and where? These are just some of the questions asked in relation to information and file sharing.

Middlesbrough Council and Glasgow City Council provided some of the answers via their own experiences.

Transforming Children’s Services in Middlesbrough

Joining the Socitm session was Leanne Hamer, Information, Complaints and Records Manager at Middlesbrough Council, who explained the Council’s adoption of secure software for community good: ‘We had an issue across our children’s services department, particularly around children who go missing… it was a very disjointed approach. So, to notify somebody, for example, that a young person had gone missing, it’s numerous phone calls and a lot of staff involved, including the staff out in the field physically looking for these individuals.

‘At 2 o’clock in the morning when you get a call, you’re sort of thinking, there’s got to be a better way of doing this… It was an absolute no-brainer that we needed to involve Objective Connect in this service.

‘So, we had conversations with the police, service managers, directors within the service, health, and anybody else that needed to be informed that these young people were missing. We set up forms within the system where staff could keep them updated, hit one button, and they are notified immediately. Everybody knows, everybody gets the alert, and more importantly, nobody can say they’re not informed because we’ve got the audit trails.

‘It cut down the effort from a member of staff having to say, “you’re my first phone call, I’ve got another 15 to make” before the effort then goes into finding and safeguarding the young people involved. All involved parties have got all the information, all at the same time in one place – from what they’re wearing and what they look like to any of the risks involved.

‘We use Objective Connect in lots of other ways, but this is a shining example of the improvements that it’s made to the service have shown for us in Middlesbrough.’

Safeguarding vulnerable women in Glasgow

The Glasgow City Council Violence Against Women Partnership is responsible for managing the MARAC (Multi Agency Risk Assessment Conference) process across the city.

The MARAC network comes together every four weeks to consider high-risk victims of domestic abuse. Multiple agencies use the MARAC process to assess the level of risk to identified victims, share known information about the victims, perpetrators, and associated children, and take action to mitigate against this.

Prior to a digital method of collaboration, such sensitive information was handed over via physical files, where the threat of files being misplaced, lost or falling into the wrong hands was high.

Glasgow City Council has since set up secure Objective Connect Workspaces when working with other local authorities, police, health providers, education settings and others, to securely share and collaborate on sensitive information. As a result, the team have an efficient and safe way to share and collaborate to protect those at serious risk of being harmed.

‘I knew we could use Objective Connect to establish secure workspaces for our teams and make sure we could share information securely. In the past year, almost 600 vulnerable women have come to our attention as being high-risk victims, and that equates to around 1,200 to 1,500 children and young people.’

Digital collaboration enables change for the better

Digital transformation in social care drives much needed change in how responders provide care to those in need. Specifically, the secure and streamlined sharing of case information delivers more effective, efficient collaboration with networks allowing for a faster response to prevention, intervention, or follow-up. A fit-for-purpose, secure, cloud solution to collaboration can provide a complete picture of each case across the response network saving valuable time and resources leading to better outcomes for vulnerable people.

Secure cloud collaboration for Social Care Designed specifically for UK government and local authorities, Objective Connect is a secure external file collaboration solution that gives complete control over the information shared across organisations. To learn more about how you can securely collaborate with a complimentary Objective Connect trial, click here.

Photo by Fa Barboza