ECINS is being used by a multi-agency partnership in Nottinghamshire to assist them in the management of sexual assault and rape cases across the county.
The Topaz Centre, part of Nottinghamshire Rape Crisis Centre, is committed to providing a sensitive and dedicated service that meets the needs of victims of rape and serious sexual assault within Nottinghamshire through the partnership involving Nottinghamshire Police, Nottingham University Hospital NHS Trust Paediatricians, Nottinghamshire Sexual Health and Genitourinary (GU) Medicine Services, forensic provider G4S and a range of voluntary support sector organisations and counselling services. The partnership also works closely with the Nottinghamshire Police and Crime Commissioner, NHS England, Nottinghamshire Crime and Drugs Partnership, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University and education establishments across the county.
Service Manager Deborah Hooton spoke to Empowering-Communities about the ways they are using ECINS to improve their services.
“Our main reason for adopting ECINS is to improve the quality of the data we are collecting to inform service delivery, improve access for our clients and to enable us to eventually dispense with our cumbersome paper-based system. Having all our information in an electronic format on ECINS, which can be accessed remotely, will enable our Outreach team to work outside of the office in community settings thus providing significant cost and time savings on travel.
We see the main benefits of using ECINS as:
- Improving our data analysis and trend comparisons
- Quality assure our pathways
- Waiting list management
- Supporting us to be more flexible in how we deliver services
- Enabling us to be more robust in outreach
- Providing flexibility for our workforce to reduce their travel time and mileage
- Tracking the team workload to ensure that it is evenly distributed across team members
- Being able to share information, on a case by case basis, with local partners such as MARACs.
Improved Data Analysis and Reporting
A very large piece of work which Empowering-Communities has recently completed for us is the development of a bespoke export tool which is enabling us to create reports with much richer data than we could provide before. The reports are allowing us to look at a very wide range of data provided by victims of sexual assault and sexual violence and get a complete picture of survivors based on detailed criteria such as medical backgrounds, age, ethnicity and vulnerabilities. This data will enable us to find trends and comparisons which we will then feed through nationally to the commissioning team and our local commissioners.
Currently we operate using an array of excel spread sheets which holds detailed information on a range of criteria. We are planning to transfer some of this information to ECINS and the ECINS team are in the process of developing a new assessment for us which will allow us to glean even more data across all the information we currently hold in the spread sheets and run our own reports on a much wider range of data than we have historically been able to do.
Data Quality and Autonomy
“Improved data quality and ownership of reporting is a key area of improvement for us. We are now able to run reports ourselves and carry out trend analysis without having to outsource that work, which is proving very useful. We can make comparisons with previous quarters and manipulate and investigate trends more efficiently and without the reliance on external support to provide that data for us. The team and the commissioners are really excited about the type and quality of data we are able to extract and how it will help us plan and develop. With thousands of paper files it has not always been possible in the past to keep track of some information, for example there was no way previously of us being able to track the timescale involved from beginning to support an individual to the result of a court case. With ECINS it is much easier to keep files updated and we can get court outcome information ourselves rather than rely on others.
Data Storage
Another benefit of ECINS is the ability to archive our information on to the system. We are planning to scan and attach all our case notes on to ECINS so that we can dispense with our paper notes and the need to store all our information remotely as we currently do. There will be a cost benefit attached to this as well as the ease of having everything in one place.
Audit Trail and Evidence
The audit trail that ECINS provides automatically is also a fantastic advantage as sometimes we get asked to submit evidence to court and having an electronic record of information is far more efficient than a paper copy which can sometimes be hard to find or with handwriting that is difficult to decipher.
Flexibility and Cost Savings
ECINS have been brilliant in helping us navigate the system and the user guides are really helpful and informative. In the long term we are confident that E-CINS will save us so much time especially with the Outreach staff and travelling time.
The flexibility that ECINS offers us is a key benefit for us. Having all of the team working on the same system concurrently provides massive efficiency benefits – everything will be so much quicker and the quality of data we will get from it will be so much better.
We are heavily promoting ECINS within our partnership and encouraging individual partners to sign up so that we can share more information securely, improve the quality of our data and improve outcomes for our customers.”
Testimonial
“I would like to express my gratitude to the team for the above and beyond effort that you have provided in order to deliver the ECINS case management and reporting system and the support that you have provided to The Topaz Centre team. I recognise the hours of work and problem solving that has gone into developing the SARC reporting capabilities and its fabulous to see the end results that has enabled the completion of the data and information report for our commissioners.
I know that members of the ECINS team have worked over the weekends and into the evenings to support us with this report and it’s enabled it to be delivered on time today!
The data reporting is far more accurate than our previous database and I am very confident that we can now deliver information with 100% reporting accuracy. I’m looking forward to working with the ECINS team when the new assessment is ready to go live in order that we can refine our questions and answer choices and broaden the reporting scope to include the answers to the whole assessment.
It has been a very interesting and steep learning curve for The Topaz Centre team and we will work to improve our data inputting to ensure that the formatting and answers are collated accurately to enable the report to be generated.
Again thank you for your on-going support and professionalism when dealing with my enquiries which you have always responded to timely and in a way that is clear and understandable.”
Deborah Hooton, Service Manager
