“Around £8 billion a year is spent on around 120,000 families that have multiple problems, with funding only getting to local areas via hundreds of separate schemes and agencies. Despite this investment, these families' problems continue.
Services need to join up and intervene earlier so that families are given the chance to turn their lives around. This integrated, early intervention approach will also drive down costs.”
Department of Communities and Local Government, October 2010
Delivering a proactive and coordinated response to the needs of complex families is a significant challenge. As well as being hampered by systemic funding challenges, being addressed by DCLG’s Community Budgets initiative, the inability of to establish and maintain a common, cross agency view of these families prevents organisations from delivering a coordinated response.
The consequence of these failings is that these households cost the public sector a fortune, and service delivery is often chaotic, with the left hand not necessarily knowing what the right hand is doing.
What we offer
By helping local government agencies create and share a common view of vulnerability and risk of harm for individuals and families; the Orion Alerting solution enables these agencies to understand which services are intervening in specific households and neighbourhoods.
In addition to establishing a common view of vulnerability and ‘risks’ for families known to have complex needs, the solution also provides a prediction of which other families and individuals are at risk of adopting chaotic lifestyles – alerting frontline staff when risk levels change.
On a practical level, agencies can for the first time get a clear idea of how many services are working with particular families, or within a specific area, allowing services to be targeted, planned and delivered far more tightly with little or no duplication.
In summary, Community Budgets provide the foundation for a more coordinated response to the needs of complex families and our Orion Alerting solutions provides a practical way to evolve and deliver this coordinated response – ensuring the maximum impact from these un-ring fenced budgets.
The solution is deployed on a 'Cloud' computing basis at a data centre that is being accredited to sit on the secure GovConnect network. Because of this approach the solution does not require a big technology integration / implementation project at client sites and can be implemented in a few months.