Project team members
Thank you to everyone on the team for their hard work on this important project.
Hounslow:
Brent:
Social Finance
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital
LOTI
Contact details
Social Finance:
Hounslow:
Brent:
Comments Off on Project team1.1 Sample and demographics
Please see the sample and demographics table for more information.
1.2 Interview objectives
Understand the extent to which gathering information about related practitioners in the adult social care context is a challenge and determine whether a Family Context style tool would support frontline practitioners in the delivery of their role.
Through this research, we seek to:
1.3 Principles of consent
All participants should be informed of the purpose of the interview in a briefing and should be given the opportunity to withdraw from the interview at any point. Regular check-in points should be provided throughout the project to give participants the opportunity to express whether or not they feel comfortable continuing.
Alongside the written consent form, which should be shared before the session, we have provided a copy of the verbal consent procedure for interviews with facilitators (and in the discussion guide). The interviewer should read this aloud.
1.4 Timing and flexibility
The interview should last one hour. It is important that you use the full hour to give the participant the opportunity to explore the topics in sufficient detail. Try not to go over the hour as your participants may have other appointments to attend.
While the interviewer should try to cover the breadth of topics in the discussion guide, they may wish to cover some areas in greater detail than others. As such, some of the topics in the discussion guide are ‘optional’. The content of each discussion may depend on the role and experience of the participant and the interviewer should be prepared to adjust the timings outlined below.
You can use this guide to develop your research session. It is not meant to be used as a rigid script, however, and you do not need to ask every question in the order they are presented or meet all the objectives listed under ‘Purpose of section’. Rather, you should use the questions as a guide to support your conversation with the participant, probing deeper and deviating when necessary.
The interview is a chance for you to prompt the participant to tell stories in a way that makes sense to them, rather than achieve a set of rigid objectives. Be prepared to be flexible!
1.5 Questionnaire
You might find it useful to base your questionnaire on the one we used for our project.
1.6 Recruitment tracker
Use the recruitment tracker tables to keep track of people you’ve reached out to for recruitment.
Comments Off on Templates and advice27. Develop a training guide
We recommend spending time developing training, guidance and support for potential users of the tool. This training could be delivered face to face, via a written training guide, or through e-learning packages.
The capacity you have available to support the operational tool will largely determine which training package you are able to offer to frontline staff but if ‘static’ training packages are chosen, such as e-learning or training guides, make sure to update these at regular intervals to ensure that their content matches the tool as it develops.
Areas your training should cover include:
All Local Authorities are already delivering mandatory information governance training so you may be able to reuse this content.
28. Increase the regularity of data flows and automate
For a tool to be fully operational, you need a means of regularly sharing data so that practitioners are not viewing out-of-date information. Work with the providers of the data to agree the frequency of which data is transferred (with our prototype, we agreed one-off transfers of data on a specific date).
The regularity will be influenced by the capacity of business intelligence teams and technical considerations, such as whether live server connections can be established.
If you do not have a data lake in place for internal, council-owned datasets, consider live server connections between host databases and the database you are using to feed the Family Context tool.
For external datasets, you could consider setting up:
You should seek to limit the number of manual processes that need to be performed by a data team and automate these where possible.
29. Increase the range of data flows
The aim of our prototype approach was to prove or disprove the concept of the tool and its efficacy in practice. This meant that it focused on a subset of the datasets identified as important by practitioners in our user research phase.
The limited capacity of a short prototype project was also a consideration in this. It takes time to undertake careful engagement and align thinking with partners regarding data sharing.
Use the prioritised list of data sources that you produced during the research phase to prioritise which datasets should be added to the tool once it becomes operational.
Top tips
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30. Increase the number of users
Once the tool is operational, you could consider growing the user base. The addition of any new users should be reflected within your DPIA and DSAs with partners.
New users might involve new internal council teams who have a legitimate business need to access the platform or you could consider using Microsoft Active Directory to allow access to external partners. You should carefully work through with your Data Protection lead about whether access is appropriate for these new roles.
Comments Off on Expansion of data and usersPlease note: Our project finished at the end of the prototyping phase. The advice and guidance in this part of the toolkit is therefore based on our experience on other projects and best practice approaches to agile product development.
25. Agree ownership of product
By its nature, the Family Context tool is both accessed by and requires data from a range of services. It also involves stakeholders from across IT functions, digital transformation, information security, and information governance.
You should therefore try to outline who will take responsibility for ongoing support and management of the solution at the end of the project, which teams will have ultimate say in future changes, and how ongoing costs of the tool will be funded.
When considering ‘ownership’ there are broadly two options, with distinct benefits and constraints:
| ‘Service’ Owned | ‘Digital’ Owned |
| Ownership sits within the Adult Social Care service | Ownership sits within the IT / Digital Transformation service |
Benefits:
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Benefits:
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Constraints:
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Constraints:
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Both are viable options but we have observed that it works best when the tool is managed by the digital functions. For this to be effective, however, close links should be maintained with the service to ensure that the tool is responsive to and able to meet the needs of users.
26. Introduce a change management process
As the tool starts to be used more widely across the service there will inevitably be requests to alter both its functionality and the information held within. You will not be able to respond to all requests at once so a clear change process should be introduced and a prioritised list created, which considers:
How the change will interface with existing functionality (e.g. if a new screen is added, do all previous links still function as expected?)
| Top tip
Due to the way the Family Context tool is built, some elements are hard coded and not as easy to adapt if your team has limited developer experience. If you would like to discuss the tool, please contact the project manager at Social Finance (contact details in the Project Team section). |
Comments Off on Ownership and governance
16. Understand the Family Context tool
The Family Context tool has been developed using the Django framework and other Python libraries to offer a secure and easy-to-maintain product.
When connected to a database and Azure SSO, it can act as a microservice where organisations can control access and send data to it to display to users in a controlled and simple way.
17. Map your current technical environment
We chose to develop the Family Context tool in a way that can be easily containerised. This is to ensure that it can be easily deployed into any desired virtual environment (AWS EC2, Azure VM, etc). Using AWS as an example, we could use an infrastructure like the one in the diagram below.
| Important note
The following is a recommended outline and not a fully implemented solution. You will need to ensure that this approach works for your local infrastructure and technical environment. |
In this solution, the app is run in an EC2 or ECS instance behind a load balancer which is connected to the SSL Certificate. Cognito can handle permissions easily when linked to an SSO provider such as Azure. The repository has a sample infrastructure script that could be used as a starting point, but it is provided as is and will likely require changes to secure and deploy the final solution.
18. Build your combined dataset
The Family Context Tool does not handle matching data for you. Instead, it displays already matched data.
This means that you need to first decide on a set of data sources that would serve as a good starting point, then match these data sources together and send the result to the tool to serve to users.
When deciding which data sources to use, pick a diverse set of sources that you have ready access to. In particular, you may want to consider:
If relying on existing agreements, make sure these are checked and allow the data to be used for the purposes as outlined for the Family Context tool.
For this project, Brent already had an established and operationalised data lake (a large, multi-functional means of holding near real-time data from multiple services) that contained matched data from a range of services, whereas Hounslow had to build their combined dataset from scratch.
19. Involve information security colleagues and adhere to internal policies and procedures
The Family Context tool requires users to have access to personal data from internal systems. There are higher levels of risk associated with transferring and holding this kind of data.
Your organisation should therefore have strong information security measures in place to ensure the safety of this data and you should involve information security colleagues in the design of the combined dataset to ensure that internal policies and procedures are being adhered to.
This is especially important as you will likely also be processing partner data and partners will want assurances that the data you are handling is being properly protected.
20. Use strong matching criteria
Once you have your data sources, you need to match them together within the internal system you will be using. In order to do this, it is best to settle on a set of matching criteria.
The following questions provide a useful starting point:
If in doubt, be cautious. Only match when you’re certain that the records match.
Taking the above points into consideration, the Family Context tool was designed to match using the following fields because these are regularly found within multiple data sets and provide relatively low risk for matching:
| Important notes
A note of caution about approaches to matching:
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21. Agree a policy for data conflicts and inconsistencies
Due to the need to match multiple data sources together, conflicts between data sources will naturally arise (e.g. a system holds the incorrect NHS Number for a patient or a GP holds an address for a patient that is different to the one held by the housing service).
You should have a clear idea of how to manage these conflicts and whether reporting will be built in to notify data sources of errors or conflicts. You may also want to display to users which source holds which address for an individual if there are inconsistencies, in order to reduce the risk of incorrect information being displayed.
Any uncertainty needs to be pushed back to data owners to resolve or be treated as a separate record depending on the situation.
22. Agree policies for data retention and displaying information
You should have a clear understanding of how long data will be displayed within the front end of the Family Context tool.
For this prototype, our teams agreed that only current service involvement should be displayed and that historical involvement with services would not be displayed.
This decision was made because showing historic information would have led to more complex retention policies and approaches to be implemented, which was considered out of scope for the prototype.
The nature of what data is displayed within the tool, how long it displays for, and how it will be removed from the combined dataset should be agreed by all partners and strictly adhered to.
23. Deploy the Family Context tool on top of the matched dataset
Once the application is deployed on the infrastructure and the data is ready to be loaded, please refer to the instructions on the github repository to learn how to load the data into the system.
24. Test the tool with frontline practitioners and iterate
Finally, the tool should be tested with frontline practitioners and continuously iterated to improve it. Be prepared for requests for additional data sources, highlighting of mismatches and error reporting. A tool like Family Context is never ‘finished’ and should be iterated over time to ensure it is still adding value to practitioners.
Comments Off on Technical considerations8. Define and test your hypotheses
Spend time mapping out your existing assumptions and conducting user research about the difficulties that staff working in adult social care face when gathering information to support them in their roles and what a good solution might look like. Doing this will help when you design your discussion guide (see step 11).
Important notes
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Examples of assumptions in our project include:
9. Identify your user groups and sample sizes
For each of the assumptions you list, consider who you need to speak with to understand more about the issue, then group your assumptions into categories based on these users. Wherever possible, get information ‘from the source’ (i.e. the person who can share their own experience of the issue).
In our project, the focus was on the following user groups:
Next, set a target for how many people from each user group you think you will need to speak with in order to understand the issues fully.
This target does not have to be fixed – when you start to hear the same themes and are not uncovering any new insights, you can stop interviewing participants. You can also change who you speak with. For example, you might uncover a user group that you hadn’t previously considered or you might refine your user groups to incorporate both newly qualified and senior practitioners.
10. Decide on appropriate research methods
It is important to select the right research method based on the questions you’re planning to ask, what you know about the user groups you’ve identified, and the time or resource constraints you are working within.
Some of the most common methods for this kind of research are one-to-one interviews and focus groups. Or you can take a more informal approach and make use of existing meetings, such as Adult Social Care team meetings.
If you are under time pressure, focus groups are a good way of gathering insight from multiple individuals in one session, especially if they are senior individuals with greater demands on their time. For our project, we conducted a series of one-to-one interviews.
Positives and negatives of different research methods
| One-to-one interviews | Focus groups |
| Allows for deep understanding of one person’s experience, leading to more nuanced insights | Group conversation might spark comments that would not come out in a one-to-one session |
| Time-consuming | More efficient as perspectives from multiple people are collected in a single session |
| Can be easier to facilitate | Can be more difficult to keep the discussion on track and ensure everyone feels comfortable and has the chance to speak |
| May be more appropriate if discussing sensitive / personal topics |
11. Produce a discussion guide
Discussion guides define the topics that will be covered in user interviews and establish the key questions you need to ask. They also ensure consistent methodology, which will help you to analyse the findings later.
Your discussion guide should contain:
During an interview, it is natural for a conversation to not follow the structure set out in your discussion guide. Be prepared to be flexible while also ensuring that your key questions are being answered. You might like to practise with your colleagues to build confidence about getting conversations back on track if your interviewee takes you in an unexpected direction.
You can find the discussion guide we developed for our project in the User research guide section and can change and adapt it so it is specific to your local authority.
Important notes
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12. Schedule interviews and obtain consent
When recruiting people to participate in your research, you may find it helpful to draft an ‘expression of interest’ e-mail (in the body of an email or as an ‘information sheet’ attachment). This should include:
It is also a good idea to decide on remuneration at this stage and to attach an informed consent form to the email so that people have all the information they need to make a decision.
You can find a template for the participant information sheet we used in our project in the User research guide section.
The informed consent form serves as a way to confirm that your potential participant understands the purpose of the research, what they will be asked to do, and how data from the session will be managed. Remember to include whether you intend to audio/video record the session, plus how any data collected from the session will be stored and when it will be deleted.
The participant does not need to sign this form but they will need to at least give verbal consent at the very start of the session. You should refer to local policies and procedures as it might not be necessary to obtain consent and we recommend recording the session if you are speaking to staff in an informal setting, such as a team meeting.
| Top tip
Use a tracker to help you stay organised with recruiting participants and monitor the number of interviews scheduled for each user group. You can find a blank template for tracking recruitment activity in the User research guide section. |
13. Analyse and synthesise your findings
After the research sessions have been completed, you need to analyse the content to draw out and categorise the most pertinent information, then synthesise this information into insights that answer your questions and inform what kind of solution your users need.
It may be useful to produce an overarching list of data points, features or suggestions that practitioners identify as important and to look at the frequency of mentions to help you understand which areas should be prioritised.
| Top tip
Miro is a virtual whiteboarding tool that is often used for this kind of work. You can find a link to a Miro template to enable analysis research in the User research guide section. This enables you to transfer key ideas from your user research into virtual post-it notes that you can group together to identify common challenges experienced across different user groups. |
14. Test your findings
Before finalising your learnings, you should try to validate your findings with users.
Validation with a small sample of interviewees will ensure that your interpretation of their experiences is correct and enable you to make any changes. For our project, we arranged follow-up conversations with three of the most engaged interviewees from our initial round of research to confirm our findings before sharing with a wider group.
You can also test your findings with managers. We used the Project Governance Group to test and validate our findings with strategic managers from across the partnership.
15. Present your findings
We chose to present our findings in a wider Discovery and User Research report.
Depending on your local context this approach may be too formal – a presentation outlining your findings and how the Family Context tool could be adapted to meet the local context might be more suitable.
Publishing your findings in an accessible way can help your research participants see the contribution they made and can also help other Local Authorities and partners to understand more about how to deliver similar work.
Comments Off on Understanding the local context1. Confirm there is no similar tool in your area
It is critically important to first ascertain if there is a tool in your area (either in operation or under development) that performs the function of the Family Context tool.
The North West London ICB’s ‘New Systems Group’ has been set up to ensure that new tools within the ICB geography do not duplicate existing tools. Check to see if a similar group is in operation in your area and engage with them to ensure that your project does not duplicate what is already in operation.
| How the Family Context tool works
The tool gives professionals a joined-up view of who is already engaged with services under a thematic area (e.g. Children’s Social Care and Adult Social Care). To do this, agencies share professional involvement data with a central body, which matches this to create a single record for each individual. The Family Context tool is deployed on top of this combined dataset, detailing the services that an individual is presently engaged with. This enables efficiency through reduction in the time spent by practitioners ‘calling around’ (phoning services to understand which ones are involved with an individual’s care provision) and better coordination of care between services. You can access a demo of the children’s social care tool with sample data here. As this is a wireframe built to demonstrate functionality, you do not need a username or password. Click on the green boxes to go from page to page. |
| Important note
After transitioning from Commissioning Care Groups to Integrated Care Boards in 2022, ICBs were required to develop a Shared Care Record. These records bring together information from various sources involved in an individual’s care, including medical information, service involvement and care plans. Development and deployment of these records varies by area (they might not be available to Social Care staff within Local Authorities or available as ‘read only’) so it is important to consider the stage of deployment of your local Shared Care Record, what information it holds, and who has access to this information when deciding whether the Family Context tool is appropriate for your area. |
2. Establish a project plan with distinct phases
We recommend that you define the different phases of work, with clear outputs for each, so you can easily move from one phase of the work to the next and effectively track progress.
For our project, we followed four distinct phases:
3. Set strong project governance and project management principles
We delivered our project using an agile project management framework. This involved regular ‘ceremonies’ to ensure timely delivery of project outputs and opportunities for regular feedback to adjust the project approach. We also set up an overarching governance group to ‘check and challenge’ project delivery, and convened specific working groups around thematic areas.
Regular involvement of representatives from the London Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI) across all groups was incredibly helpful in terms of keeping them informed about project progress and ensuring that any changes to project scope and delivery could be effectively managed.
A breakdown of our ceremonies, the individuals involved, and the frequency of meetings can be found below:
Top tips
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4. Secure internal support from key stakeholders
It is important to secure buy-in for the implementation of the tool before the project launches and to carefully manage this over the duration of the project. The suggestions about governance (see step 3) will support this, as will consideration and involvement of the relevant service areas.
Deploying the Family Context tool requires successful engagement and coordination between multiple services within the local authority, including (but not limited to) frontline services, information governance, IT and digital.
We recommend that you identify early on who the service leads are for this area and meet with them to demo the tool and outline the potential benefits of engaging and sharing information. There may be service-specific boards that you need to present to – having a slide deck outlining the benefits will be helpful.
IT teams often have limited resources to support the deployment of a new tool so it is also useful to:
5. Identify and agree your lawful basis and legal gateways for processing data
Under the GDPR, you must have an identified lawful basis for processing personal information. Spend time with your partners outlining which lawful basis you will use and, if you choose legal obligation, get a good understanding of which pieces of legislation you are using to establish ‘legal gateways’ for processing personal data. Data protection leads within your own organisation and partner organisations can help you to identify these.
| Top tip
LOTI has a dedicated Pan-London Information Governance lead with a wealth of experience who can offer advice, guidance and support. They can be reached at contact@loti.london |
You should identify early on who has the sufficient seniority within organisations to sign off on information being shared both within your own organisation and with external partners. This will likely be a head of service or equivalent – getting their sign-off early on is essential to move things along.
6. Create information governance documentation
You will need to create several documents to allow for the sharing of information to support the tool.
Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA)
This ‘living’ document will set out the details of the proposed data sharing and assess the risks – it will evolve over the duration of your project.
All partners who will be involved in sharing data will need to sign up to the DPIA and, depending on the preferences of information governance leads, you may need to complete multiple DPIAs in different organisational templates.
For simplicity, try to agree using a single DPIA with relevant governance leads within an appropriate forum (e.g. the IG Working Group) as this will prevent duplication of effort.
| Top tip
There are various online tools available to support you with completing DPIAs, such as the Dapian tool, which was co-funded by LOTI. |
Data Sharing Agreements (DSAs) (also called Information Sharing Agreements or ISAs)
A DSA or ISA is different to a DPIA as it is a static agreement between two organisations entering into a data sharing relationship. It will typically include:
Amendments to privacy notices
As the data sharing will likely constitute a new use of data, data subjects will need to be informed of this change. Privacy notices should therefore be reviewed by the project team and data protection lead to ensure they reflect this new sharing.
7. Share strong drafts with partners as early as possible
Information governance practitioners are incredibly busy and have to review many lengthy documents for large organisations. While it is critical to engage partners as early as possible, providing incomplete or draft documents is likely to increase the chances of delay. Get your documents to a significant level of completion before sharing them.
| Top tip
Consider engaging recognised experts to help you complete these documents. LOTI’s Pan-London Information Governance Lead supported us in the creation of our IG documentation. Their contribution, reputation and standing gave assurances to IG partners that we had done a thorough job. |
The delivery of services by different agencies within adult social care means that provision can sometimes be disjointed. Agencies often have limited visibility of how residents interact with other services, leading to the duplication of assessments and other inefficiencies.
In addition, individuals do not always benefit from a person-centred care model because adult services staff are unable to access the information required to deliver this, leading to poorer outcomes for those in receipt of care.
Teams in Hounslow have noted the following about the current delivery model:
Whilst digitisation and data sharing has significantly improved across the sector and had a positive impact on the experiences of those receiving care, there are still constraints and challenges – in particular around the technical, legal and cultural barriers to data sharing, which mean that agencies still experience delays.
This project demonstrates a step change for two local authorities in North West London. By testing a tool that has helped to create efficiencies in the children’s social care space, the aim was to surface the information that professionals working within adult social care need to do their jobs more effectively.
Comments Off on The importance of this projectThe ‘Developing a Professional Linkage Platform in Adult Social Care’ project sought to test whether the Family Context tool (previously developed by Social Finance to support professionals working in Children’s Social Care) could be effectively deployed within the adult social care environment across two boroughs in North West London.
The project sought to understand:
The project was conducted by Hounslow and Brent councils with support from Social Finance between March 2023 and March 2024. It was funded by the London Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI) as part of its New Service Models In Adult Social Care fund.
A multidisciplinary team of subject matter experts, service designers, delivery managers, developers and others worked on the project (see Project team).
Comments Off on About this project ← Older posts 
