Worcestershire County Council - Case Study

Having the right data to inform decision making around planning and budgeting for Adult Social Care is vital during times of stability and even more so during a pandemic. When Worcestershire County Council adopted Social Care Landscape (now Access PAMMS Social Care Landscape), a powerful predictive tool to analyse social care requirements, it took collaboration and plenty of juggling to work around the biggest national and global disruption in recent times.

The Council were originally working with Affinity Works which is now part of the Access Group. This is how they achieved success:

Worcestershire (WCC) signed up to Landscape in early 2020 and just as things were due to progress, the pandemic hit.  Like most local authorities, many projects including Landscape were parked whilst staff were redeployed so they could respond to the problems arising in their area. 

Shutdown Testing

During the WCC’s project shutdown period the team behind Social Care Landscape continued to move forward. A test environment was established and three of Landscape’s report collections built with open data were made ready for when WCC were able to re-activate their project team; namely Quality & Capacity, Delayed Transfer of Care (DToC) and Population & Prevalence. 

Data Transfer Solution

By September 2020, Worcestershire had resource ready to start with data transfer from the local ContrOCC system the immediate priority. The team worked closely with WCC’s IT and IG teams to establish an operational data feed, facilitated by shrink-wrapped extract scripts for ContrOCC that are available as part of the wider Landscape solution. No local analyst resources were required to extract data and it was simple to get the reports that analyse and present the local data back to Landscape up and running. Embedding of the scripts in WCC’s ‘Extract Transform and Load’ toolset ensured the data transfer process was fully automated for the Local Authority.

Enabling Technology, Energy & Enthusiasm

As soon as the project reactivated, meetings switched over to Microsoft Teams, an early example of the rapid transition the sector has seen in its mode of working – shifting from face-to-face site visits and phone calls to the enabling technology that has allowed things to be delivered through the constraints of lock-down.

Despite working against the challenging backdrop of an increasing workload caused by re-emerging COVID cases, the WCC team maintained their energy and enthusiasm for the project. As soon as the local finance system data was available they started exploiting Landscape to support internal work streams even before formal transition into Business as Usual.

Delivery in a Pandemic

From a supplier perspective the timely shift to virtual working and the energy and enthusiasm of the LA team have been critical enablers of the project. In addition, the customer having a dedicated PM resource as a single point of contact throughout was invaluable helping ensure targeted timescales were achieved with only minor delays that were inevitable as WCC continued to deal with high priority issues around COVID.  

The project has also benefited from active ongoing support of senior sponsors ensuring that the work to get WCC live with Landscape in December retained its profile and its resourcing amongst other competing priorities.

Having spotted Landscape as a key tool to support local budgeting and planning, the Finance team were first to go live with further roll out to Commissioning, Performance and other Adult Social Care stakeholders.  

A final word from the customer

Good management information has never been more important, especially around Adult Care, and we have been working with Affinity Works (now Access) to implement their ground-breaking Social Care Landscape product. This is now in place and is changing the way we make decisions and view our trends and data. Given the challenge of the last year we have appreciated both the expertise and flexibility in approach shown by the team and their personal commitment to develop and adapt solutions to meet our specific needs.’’

Michael Hudson, Chief Financial Officer, Worcestershire County Council