One of the ways ECINS helps customers with their Troubled Families initiatives is through a specially created Family Risk Assessment Tool.  The electronic ECINS Family Assessment functionality was developed in conjunction with a team of troubled families co-ordinators to ensure it properly reflects the needs and challenges of existing users. The project is ongoing and will be continually developed to ensure it meets users’ shifting needs and requirements and the varying needs of future users. 

The Questions
We created a library of family assessment questions that were supplied by partnerships from around the country and all participating counties were able to submit questions.  Troubled Families (TF) Teams were able to select the questions they wanted in their assessments.

The library of questions were made up of both objective (factual) and subjective (opinion based) questions. Users were able to download statistics from the factual questions to build a variety of different analytical data as required.

The Assessment
Once the assessment or assessments were created they were available to practitioners within that scheme. When an assessment is started it automatically ‘pulls through’ the family members. This speeds up the assessment process and provides critical data for practitioners’ management and Payment By Results reports.

Once completed, users can apply their own access permissions to the assessment to restrict access to it, if required.

Completed assessments can be duplicated at a later date if necessary. For example if an assessment is carried out in January it can be duplicated in April if the family are re-assessed, saving practitioners time and negating the requirement to keep asking the same questions of the family again and again.

Examples of the objective questions are listed below and, depending on the answer, another question might appear in order to collect more information:

Are any children excluded from school? Do any children have Special Educational Needs? Have any adults been convicted of a criminal offence in the last 12 months?

Examples of the subjective questions include:

Tenancy History: How do the parents/family members relate to one another?

Routines and boundaries: Are there good routines and boundaries?

A number of counties intend to complete some or all of their electronic assessments at the families’ address saving them a considerable amount of time.

The Family Assessment is a significant piece of development and provides counties with a library of core questions that will enable them to build up a richer picture of the families they are working with, the challenges they face and the differences or similarities between them. It also allows practitioners to monitor which interventions are working and to carry out assessment reviews at regular intervals so that they can record data over a set timeframe and compare results.  The data will prove invaluable, particularly to government agencies, third sector voluntary and support organisations. This will help them understand the issues facing troubled families and the correlations between them.

For more information about ECINS Family Assessment Tool or to arrange for an online demonstration please contact us at enquiries@ecins.com