Lowestoft Rising is a radical approach to delivering public sector services, creating an environment where public sector organisations work together in innovative ways to deliver better services and bring about long-term change for local people in Lowestoft, Suffolk.
Comprising a group of five public sector partners – Suffolk Police, Suffolk Police and Crime Commissioner’s office, Waveney District Council, Suffolk County Council and NHS Great Yarmouth and Waveney Clinical Commissioning Group, Lowestoft Rising aims to create a significantly improved quality of life for everybody growing up, living in, working in, visiting and investing in Lowestoft.
Phil Aves, SCC Partnership Change Manager for Lowestoft Rising said ‘Waveney District Council have used E-CINS for a number of years to run their ASB meetings and this led to us adopting it to run our Lowestoft Rising Intervention Meetings. It has enabled us to speed up processes, saved time on admin and we have been able to make savings from negating the need to print and distribute reports and materials and lessening travel time because much of the workload is managed on ECINS.
‘Many of the individuals we support through Lowestoft Rising are vulnerable and have complex needs and there are a range of organisations and agencies who are involved in providing interventions to support them. Sometimes there are agencies who are involved in the partnership who do not know the individuals who have been referred in and in cases like these photographs are invaluable. Agencies might not be aware of people’s individual names but they often recognise faces. ECINS provides a huge benefit here in enabling us to upload photos so that everyone knows who they are talking about’.
The Lowestoft Rising Intervention Meetings take place once a month at Lowestoft Police Station and there are usually around 20 people in attendance. As Chair of the meeting Phil puts the Agenda together and emails it around to the meeting attendees. The majority of the representatives who attend the meeting have access to ECINS and can therefore access all of the reports and documentation on the system prior to the meeting.
‘This saves a considerable amount of time and resources as I do not have to collate, email or distribute hard copies of the meeting subject matter as everyone can access it online, in realtime all from the one place on ECINS’ said Phil. ‘We create one case and every individual profile has a named report within that case so that we can see the running log. This makes it very simple for all of the meeting representatives to access the information they need for the meeting.
‘At the meeting we have a large screen which we project ECINS onto so that everyone is looking at the same, live, information. We have a dedicated PCSO assigned to attend in an administrative capacity and they are responsible for updating ECINS with any outcomes from the meeting so that everything is recorded accurately and kept in one place. ECINS keeps a log of all of the individual profiles who have been added to a case which enables the team to use the data for forward planning.
‘We can see how many people we have supported during a period of time. make comparisons and look for trends that can help us prepare for the possibility of future referrals and look for spikes where support needs may be higher’ said Phil.
Phil concluded ‘Lowestoft Rising is enabling us to work in collaboration with our partners, integrating and improving services to make them more effective and accessible for the people of Lowestoft. In particular though we are improving mental wellbeing for everyone, and providing greater support to prevent and address drug and alcohol dependency. ECINS has a key role to play in this by ensuring everyone has access to the same information, in one place and in realtime so that we can all stay abreast of changes as they happen’.
