Locality teams information sharing
Working together for children and young people.
In order to provide better support for children, young people and their parents and carers, we are improving the way we use and share information.
This will help us to provide better support for those who need it, and will allow us to identify and act on early signs of difficulties.
In the past, professionals have often held information about one aspect of a child’s development and have often been unaware of other information held by other professionals. In order to provide good quality services for children and their families, all people involved need to be aware of as full a picture as possible relating to all aspects of a child’s life. We are also seeking to reduce the need for you to keep telling the same story over again to lots of different people.
Why will information sharing improve support for children and young people?
Agencies and services dealing with children already hold a certain amount of information about each child. For example – schools will know who to contact in an emergency, whether your child has any allergies or particular needs.
Additionally, a few authorised people in each of these services will also have access to a database with basic information about your child, including name, address, name of parent or carer, and a list of services they have used in the past or are currently using. You may be asked for this information if you or someone on your behalf makes a request to a Locality Team for support, to help your child.
Sometimes, when children require extra support, as most will do from time to time, it is essential for different professionals to talk to each other to help you decide on the right solutions to the problems. The database makes it possible for professionals to know at an earlier stage, who to talk to in order to better help children and young people.
How does this affect parents?
If you contact us about a possible problem or concern that you may have about your child we may decide to carry out a full assessment of the situation with you (this is known as the CAF or Common Assessment Framework).
When we do a CAF we will ask for your consent to access other relevant details about your child’s life, so that we get a complete picture about your child, his/her needs and which service or services are best positioned to help your child with his/her particular problem.
As soon as you give consent to access this information, we might appoint a "lead professional" to deal with your child's case, especially if a number of different people might need to be involved. This person will pull together necessary information that will help decide which services to offer to best help you and your child.
On rare occasions there may be times when parental or carer consent to share information is not required. This would only happen if there was a concern about possible serious harm to your child through abuse or neglect, or if there were concerns about dangerous or offensive behaviour being committed by or to him/her.
Case study: Jack
Jack has always attended a mainstream school and made good progress. Over the past 6 months his results have gone down and he's been quiet and not joining in as he once used to. The school have tried to help Jack but now feel they need additional help from other services. Jack, his parents, his teacher and a lead professional met to discuss the issues. This helped to establish which services should be approached to help Jack.
An educational psychologist, a teacher, a health professional and a welfare officer worked together to help Jack overcome his problems and return to achieving better outcomes again at school. Information was placed on a database so that all of these workers could get to it when they needed to.
Questions?
If you have any questions or issues on information sharing, please call 0161 909 6530. Information about locality teams can be found at www.salford.gov.uk/localityteams.
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This page was last updated on 24 October 2008
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