Single Assessment Programme

The project issues
The North West E-Government Group (NWeGG) comprises the 46 local authorities in the North West and focuses on facilitating joint working within the region to help achieve e-government targets. The achievement of the national target to introduce a Single Assessment Process (SAP) for older people by April 2004 would require the region’s health, social services and support agencies to work together and address a number of issues in respect of information sharing and protocols. As NWeGG did not have the resource to undertake this work they commissioned a series of projects and appointed Socitm Consulting to programme manage the delivery of these.

The Socitm Consulting solution
Socitm Consulting’s role involved the management of the overall work programme, co-ordinating work across five parallel work packages and facilitating the dissemination of the findings and deliverables from them to a wide health and social care audience across the North West. The work packages were concerned with information governance (including user consent, information-sharing protocols, operational guidance and training), access to service directories (pre-existing and purpose-built), person referencing (primarily, how and when social services should obtain a client’s NHS number), an output-based specification of the electronic SAP model to be used and specification of the necessary EDI interfaces required to achieve it. For reasons beyond our control, the fifth workstream was not completed.

Socitm Consulting’s approach was based on its experience of handling cross-agency projects in the public sector, particularly those involving the use of ICT and information management to enable this type of joined-up working. The consultant chosen to lead the project had extensive NHS and PRINCE2 project management experience. PRINCE was pragmatically applied across each project and the overall programme. This enabled the management of the individual consultants involved, supported by regular update meetings with both them and NWeGG as the client. The project culminated with a series of dissemination events in the region to publicise the findings and recommendations from the individual projects.

The benefits to the client
NWeGG were able to overcome resourcing shortages within their organisation and ensure that overall timescales and budgets for the work packages were met. The effective organisation and quality assurance of the content for the dissemination events ensured that the region was well placed to meet the SAP national targets.

Project identification
Client organisation: North West e-Government Group
Client contact: Roger Dewhurst, Chief Information Officer, Greater Manchester Strategic Health Authority, t: 0161 237 2241, e: roger.dewhurst@gmsha.nhs.uk
Lead Consultant: neil.spencerjones@socitm.gov.uk
Project no: 4566