1. Improving Data on Looked After Children Suzanne Murray - Information Systems Administrator

2. East Lothian’s data recording re looked after children pre 2007 – 2008 CarePlace implemented April 2003 to record placements and legal statutes of all children looked after away from home Details of Home Supervision included in CarePlace from April 2004

3. Care plans recorded elsewhere and not connected to Carefirst Through and Aftercare details recorded (More choices, more chances and accommodation moves) added to Carefirst from April 2006

4. Pathway Co-ordinators and the existence of a Pathway Plan added in 2006 (no details of the plan recorded electronically) Scottish Candidate Numbers added to looked after children’s records where possible

5. ‘Sketchy’ recording of respite on Carefirst All payments to carers made by Softbox All payments for residential placements via BACS and recorded on locally held Excel sheets

6. Scottish Government Funding An employee already familiar with CareFirst and CarePlace given extra hours to add information to system and check quality of existing data On hindsight we should also have requested finance for a dedicated server

7. OLM and CF6 OLM installed CF6 with enough functionality to run and validate the 3 CLAS reports (LAC, TAC and Short Term) CLAS reports pull relevant information from a dataset of extracted data

8. Example of page of LAC report

9. Ability to search on individuals or certain criteria within report (e.g. missing disability status etc) Validation report highlights whether child record is invalid (e.g. LA not responsible for child) or episode invalid (e.g. missing discharge codes) Click of a button produces XML

10. Example of validation report

11. ProcXed Set up on a shared network folder Easy to use with a little knowledge of Access Ability to add notes re exceptions (but best practice would be to amend data held in CareFirst)

12. Impact on Culture Change Practitioners more aware that the recording of placements must be accurate and up to date More information now stored centrally and electronically (e.g. paper details of respite visits now recorded on CareFirst), reducing the fragmented paper trail of a young person’s life

13. Communication While working towards submission of the report, internal relationships have improved between Social Work and Education Many employees have worked together from statisticians, practitioners, IT, team leaders, to support services Involvement from OLM has been great, with EL keeping them back at times! Health check from Fiona Nicol invaluable ScotXed have responded quickly to queries and Michael (who deserves a pay rise) has accepted criticism of the database graciously and fixed any bugs as they are found

14. Issues to be addressed for 2008/09 For EL: Integrity of data to be checked on a regular basis to reduce last minute, end of year rush For ScotXed: Inaccuracies of QA tables to be corrected For OLM: Fix problem with end dates outwith year end Reduce the duplication and double keying involved For all: Keep lines of communication open For Gary: Keep away from the CP survey!