CASE STUDY: Croydon COVID19 Community Response
02 Nov 2020
How we used technology and partnership working to support vulnerable adults during COVID19
By Karen Chillman, Head of Volunteering – Croydon Voluntary Action
When COVID19 hit, our local authority reached out to Croydon Voluntary Action to help support vulnerable adults who didn’t have a health or social care need, but still needed support.
A cross-sector partnership was set-up, to include local authority, NHS Link Workers, the VCSE and mutual aid groups across Croydon. The aim was to provide community-based care and support to vulnerable adults, including shielded and non-shielded individuals.
We, at Croydon Voluntary Action, are playing a lead role in helping to co-ordinate the community response and support. It’s all being managed by the technical solution we now have in place – but it wasn’t always like that!
A co-design partnership approach
When we first started receiving lists of vulnerable adults from the local authority everything was on spreadsheets. We carried on receiving referrals from multiple sources too – such as the Council COVID helpline, Age UK, and Social Prescribing Link Workers – and soon found that keeping track of things was a nightmare.
I reached out to Sirinda at Simply Connect for help, and we worked together to develop a case management and referral tool that could also help me track and co-ordinate services we were providing on the ground. We also involved Link Workers, volunteers and other VCSE staff to help shape how the tool needed to work.
Simply Connect were great. They reacted quickly, and invested their own resources into working with us to develop this new system, managing to turn it around in 2-3 weeks.
Technology can’t – and shouldn’t – replace people
I love technology – although I’m not very good at it! But it was important to us that the technology didn’t lead the service. Digital can’t – and shouldn’t – replace people. We needed the technology to support our current practice – rather than for it to take over.
We worked together to develop, test, and tweak – and then develop some more – and we tested it with our real life clients and volunteers, which I think made all the difference.
Now we have a system that supports every part of our service. Partners (like Age UK) can log into our system and refer clients to us, updating their records, and can see how many of their clients we’ve supported.
Our volunteers also update the system directly, and record a client’s support needs and their activity. Because we kept it simple – our volunteers love it! They can quickly start using the system with minimal training and support, helping us to respond quickly.
Introducing Croydon’s Check, Chat & Connect
Lots of people were being referred to us who were lonely and socially isolated due to shielding, a disability or illness, or their personal circumstances. Our trained volunteers provide telephone support to these clients.
We now have around 100 volunteers supporting 150 clients – or befriendees, as we like to call them – with some volunteers supporting up to three different clients each week. We work with anyone aged 18+ (although most are aged 50+).
Our volunteers phone these people each week, have a chat and make sure they’re OK, and link them in with additional support if they need it. All our volunteers have undergone DBS checks and safeguarding training, and we provide ongoing support via our WhatsApp group, with regular calls to keep them engaged.
What’s great about this system is that volunteers can login and update their own tasks, and they also receive SMS reminders of appointments they’ve got coming up. This has been a godsend – before it was a case of volunteers emailing everything through to our Volunteer Co-ordinator, but now volunteers just login and update records themselves.
And because it’s linked with our Directory of Services (a directory of quality assured services we host, that includes a referral tool and case management system) our volunteers can quickly refer people on to other support services through the system if they need to.
Our impact
We know our service is making a difference. It’s about the wrap-around care that we can provide by bringing people together to work with an individual or family.
Working in partnership with Simply Connect to deliver this service has been great. This Simply Connect tool has made a real difference to how we manage this project and I can provide regular update reports to the local authority on all our activity managed via the system.
Simply Connect’s willingness to be flexible to meet our needs is what really makes this solution work.
Meet Tel…
“Tel was a frequent caller to GP and emergency services, but didn’t have any particular health issues – he was just very lonely. We arranged food deliveries for him, and matched him to three volunteers who now call him each week to have a chat with him.
We discovered he likes puzzles, so during lockdown we delivered some puzzle books to his home. Now he’s starting to talk about going for a walk to his corner shop – which is a huge breakthrough for him as he hasn’t been outside of his house for 2 years.”
Croydon Voluntary Action are working in partnership with Simply Connect to offer this tool to other agencies supporting vulnerable adults in Croydon.
This new Simply Connect tool is available to support similar services in other areas.