Durham County Council

Care Services Project

Changing demographics and an increasing older population are escalating funding pressures on social care services.  While we can evidence significant success using digital technology to transform transactional services we recognise an urgency to turn our focus onto applying this to social care.

Durham will lead this project, working in collaboration with other Councils to harness our collective digital skills and experience to drive this forward.  Initial discussions have focused on tackling 5 key challenges

• Managing increasing demand and expectation
• Reducing fragmentation, complexity and duplication
• Driving efficiencies into the service delivery processes
• Implementing a person-centred approach
• Improving data collection to deliver insights for further development

We want to undertake further joint scoping work and user journey mapping to test common solutions, that can be adopted by other Councils

Areas for investigation

• Integrations to remove double handling and improve data quality
• Provision of a Care Account to provide user choice and control
• New digital processes to improve the UX and joint working with partner agencies
  • Pathways to social care
  • Transfer of care
  • GP and other professional referrals
  • Safeguarding and Deprivation of Liberty alerts and referrals
• Reporting dashboards to get actionable insights from data