Devon County Council

Developing Information Management at Devon County Council

Devon County Council provides a wide-range of key services across the county, from environmental and planning services, to education, community learning, transportation and social care.

Challenge

The County Council's Adult & Community Services directorate supports the social care needs of vulnerable older people and adults with disabilities. Teams of health and social care professionals work together, within hospitals and the community, combining their resources and knowledge for the benefit of the people of Devon.

Initially, those requiring help and advice relating to adult social care can contact Care Direct, part of the County Council's 'MyDevon' Customer Service Centre. Care Direct offers information and advice about care and support, pensions, benefits and keeping well. Care Direct seeks to provide the information needed or to contact the right person to help the caller.

Care Direct was finding it increasingly difficult to access the information required to resolve queries – often needing to source information from a number of disparate systems.

Solution

LSC Group is delivering a Community Management System designed to improve the management of adult social care service information and acting as a central information reference point.

Accessed via simple to use web-pages, the system has been designed to integrate existing, disparate information sources enabling County Council staff to retrieve information more quickly and efficiently.

Benefits

The Community Management System has been designed to improve significantly the information service provided to adult social care users.

Although still in its implementation phase, the anticipated benefits of this system include:

• Integration of existing, disparate information sources
• Improving the consistency and reliability of information
• Better use of existing data
• Improved knowledge sharing across the organisation
• Reducing the time taken for frontline staff to retrieve relevant information

This comprehensive solution offers Devon an information tool to help it meet the increasing demand for its services.