RPA eases the Children’s Social Care workload and speeds up delivery

In social care, frequent visits to vulnerable children and their families must be completed, often scheduled by social workers to fit several visits into a day or two to make best use of their time. It’s vital that confirmation the visit has taken place is logged and the social worker’s case notes must be updated on the system. This needed to be manually done in the office, after the day of visits, potentially 48 hours later and sometimes even longer if a court appointment or other emergency happened.

The Digital Delivery Team set up an email inbox for the RPA bot, designing a layout for social workers to send information in immediately after their visit, from their phone in their car. The emails can be dictated into the phone, making it faster than typing. The robot receives the email, ensures that it meets the requirements and checks that the person emailing in is allowed to add care notes to the system for each child. The bot then confirms on the system the date that the visit happened and adds the notes to the record.

The automated workflow was simple and fast to build. The bot handles each email as soon as it arrives. A vital benefit of this immediacy is that the record is updated in near real-time which could enable better decisions concerning a child’s wellbeing. For example, if a neighbour has called to report an issue, and when this is recorded on the system, in parallel with the social workers notes, the evaluation of the situation may be viewed differently to the neighbour’s report in isolation.

The Social Care Team appreciate the extra capacity and faster updates from the use of the RPA bots, many are running with it, suggesting further uses and improvements. An Ofsted inspection soon after Fast Case Notes was introduced was also extremely complimentary about this updating process.

The next project looked to tackle a different issue for the council: automating a laborious, boring administrative task. St Helens had to deal with updating the rental increases on their social housing stock, managed via a partner organisation.

The process was more complicated to build, due to legacy systems that hold the data. But once it was set up, the bots removed the task from the team – freeing them to focus on their other work.

Another task that St Helens has given the RPA bot is their IT System Checker. Early each morning, the bot is programmed to log into all vital departmental systems and make sure that everything is running smoothly. If any issues are found, the bot raises a ticket, alerting the IT Team to investigate and fix the issue as soon as possible.

In the past, if a system was down, a member of staff might be unable to log in and, as various departments are rota-ed to start work at different times, they may be unable to start work until IT logged in to resolve it. The bot now alerts other team members to the issue and enables IT to resolve the problem faster. This prevents staff from losing hours of productivity and has cut a source of frustration for teams across the council.