Health and social care

This discovery aimed to investigate how new technologies like Amazon’s Alexa and chatbots have the potential to reduce the need for expensive face-to-face visits. The hypothesis for this project was […]

This discovery focused on developing a standardised reporting approach for statutory returns, developing a deep understanding of the users’ needs from this process. Every day, Children’s Services Departments (CSDs) make […]

This alpha project, led by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) is looking at improving data and evidence on children in care. This project is a continuation of the discovery […]

The team is conducting a beta exploring how to let frontline workers know which services are engaged with the child’s family, in a way which works across councils. This information […]

The previous discovery had shown that front line workers in Early Help and Social Work need access to information on a child’s family, particularly what contact they’ve had with support […]

Introduction Early Help (EH) services support families with issues including domestic violence, substance misuse, mental health problems, poverty, family issues and others. EH services act before problems escalate and builds […]

Local authorities experience common problems – dealing with increasing demand, reduced budget and as a result less staff. They are also experiencing a vast set of common goals and needs […]

National picture   Nationally and locally, health and care systems need to manage the inevitable challenges of increased demand, expectations and reducing finances.   Across the UK, there are baseline […]

There’s no pan-local government ‘playbook’ describing how to make code sharing work in practice. We believe this discourages collaboration, and leads to painful reinventions of the wheel in councils where it’s tried.   Our Discovery project will work through the issues that […]

Open source communities and practices in technology have been around since the early 1960s with many academics distributing free and open software to encourage and support openness and co-operation. As […]

Debt poverty is an issue that affects all Local Authorities in the UK. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that approximately 22% of people in the UK are living in poverty. […]

Internet technologies around IoT are promising radical improvements in how we serve our residents and businesses. This gives rise to a range of emerging opportunities to achieve significant social and […]

Context: We propose to investigate the case for creating a mobile digital wallet of entitlements for local residents and local community assets, using the latest digital identity and data provenance […]

Our initial research suggests there is currently a gap between young people, particularly aged 16-24, and their local councils. For the Discovery phase we are focusing on young people and […]

This project aims to allow councils, through video calling, to gain the benefits of face-to-face communication without the traditional associated costs. When redeveloping its website in 2015, AVDC found that costs for […]

Across the UK, our population is growing increasingly unhealthy, with more people developing chronic conditions. That in turn reduces their ability to work, live independently and participate in society. There […]

We would like to explore the issue of disconnected communities and the associated problems of loneliness and lacking local support networks. These issues affect many residents, but particular older people, […]

We know that there are currently huge issues for local residents in Lincolnshire in accessing the internet. In addition, local health care providers are often frustrated by the lack of […]

In order to tackle public sector wide problems like the increasing cost of social care and health and the lack of affordable housing or jobs councils need to switch from […]

Residents that are embedded into a community are less likely to have a bad situation develop into crisis and are more able to draw on support from sources other than […]