A flexible system to support Homelessness Mortality Reviews
Summary
Homelessness Mortality Reviews
The Office of National Statistics published a report titled Deaths of homeless people in England and Wales: 2019 registrations that highlighted a 7% increase of homelessness mortality from 2018-2019, with 778 deaths of homeless people in England and Wales registered in 2019. The Government’s Rough Sleeping Strategy (2018) recommended investigation takes place when there is a death, or an incident of serious harm, of a person who is sleeping rough, to improve oversight.
The Rough Sleeping Strategy suggests Safeguarding Adult Boards follow the review process of a SAR in the case where a person sleeping rough has died, and there is a concern that partner agencies could have worked more effectively to potentially prevent this incident. This will offer the unique opportunity to take vital learning, and implement action to better support the strategies for reducing homelessness, and as a result preventing homelessness fatalities.
However, the review process can often-times rely heavily on administrative, manual tasks due to the nature of the multi-agency involvement. Time intensive tasks include distributing, chasing and consolidating agency forms, organising meetings, assigning and tracking progress of actions and collating feedback from the end report to name just some aspects of the manual, resource intensive process.
In addition, when collecting data and responses from agency partners, the information is more often than not spread out across different emails, word documents, spreadsheets and even various paper documents too. Not only does this weigh heavily on time resources, but information being stored in emails and across paperwork also compromises the security of that sensitive data.
QES Case Review System
The Case Review system is part of QES’ Holistix Safeguarding Suite enabling local, regional and national safeguarding teams to collect, interpret and gain value from multi-agency information, in order to continuously improve the safeguarding of vulnerable people, such as those sleeping rough. This is not just an opportunity to understand where there are problems, but to enforce change and prevent potentially avoidable and often tragic incidents from taking place again.
The system has been built across a wide range of applications to meet the requirements of various case review processes; with national guidance, terminology, forms and statutory timings altered depending on the application. QES are committed to evolving the system to reflect new national guidance, and continuously learning from our ever-growing user group and by attending relevant conferences and webinars.
Features Overview
Below is a brief overview of some of the Case Review features:
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Intuitive and easy to navigate system including user-friendly interface, compatibility across multiple devices, personalised dashboards and more
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Initial notification and agency involvement forms are securely completed on the system, with an automatic form consolidation feature combining all details to display a comprehensive view of circumstances provided by multiple agencies in one centralised location
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Meeting management feature supports initial organisation, managing attendance and the distributing of key information surrounding meetings (i.e. agenda, minutes, supporting documents, as well as lessons and recommendations determined from a meeting)
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Lessons, recommendations and themes are recorded, updated and available for reporting within the system. The heart of the Case Review system is to identify learning, with a multi-agency input, to ensure safeguarding practices are constantly evolving
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Action tracking and planning feature enables users to assign actions against people, link them to lessons and recommendations, establish deadline dates and monitor progress, ensuring there is an element of accountability involved in implementing changes to improve safeguarding processes
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Automated chronology feature orders an unlimited number of multiple agencies’ timeline of events into chronological order, with the ability to filter by agency, user, significance and date range
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Independent Author reports are accessible on the system with a comments facility alongside and the ability to share with team members. This enables collective input which facilitates the completion of the document to its best standard, at which point a publicly available link to the form is created for publication
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Comprehensive real-time reporting dashboard gives a visual representation of real-time statistics on common themes, lessons learnt, agency involvement and lots more. This allows safeguarding partnerships to react to emerging issues more quickly and identify where improvements must be made
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Secure and GDPR compliant with two-factor authentication code, no sensitive data leaving the system, and multiple user roles ensuring information is only seen by those with granted access permissions
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