UK Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) 
Adur and Worthing Councils
The need for well maintained local directories of community services is well established in local government, the NHS and community infrastructure organisations. Access by residents to a range of support within the community has never been more important. At present there is no national data standard for service directories – registers of information are generally embedded in front-end applications that have been created to serve different policy areas. This means that a single local authority area will have duplicating and overlapping directories within the local authority, across health trusts and many other organisations. Roland Mezulis, CIO at West Sussex County Council says, “I can think of the various directory services we have on the website including “my nearest”, Family Support, Buy With Confidence, School Directory, Roadworks etc; the service directory in Connect To Support; Local Offer; plus the system used by Libraries. Also services listed at the Health & Wellbeing Hubs” As a result of these closed systems and the resulting complexity, major case management systems such as in social care, health and housing services cannot easily integrate trustworthy community information into their case management workflows. This creates additional barriers to use and time burden. Community information cannot be easily surfaced in existing applications through APIs, and without such a register, the creation of new innovative digital services that could use such data is hampered. Allied to this, we believe there are both challenges and opportunities with the ubiquitous concept of referral and the newer ‘social prescribing’, and we want to research this with other councils with a view to creating useful referral design patterns for local public services.
- Digital leadership training (for council leaders, service managers or senior executives)
- Digital and agile awareness
- Introduction to user research
- Introduction to digital business analysis
2 thoughts on “Adur and Worthing Councils”
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As Porism Limited - LGA technical partner:
There’s certainly a need for a directory standard, perhaps with domain specific extensions for properties that don’t apply to all types of service. At present there’s a lot of waste from duplicate inconsistent directories. Associated quality assurance mechanisms are needed for people to decide if they can rely on the data rather than maintain separate overlapping directories.
A draft Service Directory standard (see https://schemas.opendata.esd.org.uk/ServiceDirectory ) was developed by iStandUK and LGA from pilot work in the North West.
The standard expects “service type” to be populated. This can be done from LGSL (see http://id.esd.org.uk/list/englishAndWelshServices) for LG services and the Open Active Activity List (see https://www.openactive.io/activity-list/) for sports. Equivalents are needed for other domains.
As CEO founder, Famiio:
I would value a conversation with you about this project. At Famiio, we have done extensive work in this area for a cross-border localgov 0-100+ family service directory and we are already in development of a localgov platform that would bring an innovative solution to exactly the challenge you describe. It would be a shame not to have a conversation and risk missing the opportunity to explore potential early-stage cross-sector collaboration.