Aberdeen City Council helps more vulnerable people by taking a platform approach with Dynamics 365 Customer Service

The complex needs of social support

Social care is both a vital task for any government organization and a potentially fraught one. It requires coordination between social workers, health care professionals, police officers, and policy makers to make sure that the most vulnerable members of society receive the care and attention they need. There are a lot of moving parts to manage. The city’s social workers assess individual needs, work with police and medical practitioners to plan out care and resources, and leverage municipal aid to keep vulnerable citizens safe and healthy. 

To provide these services to citizens, the Council needed to gather information about physical and mental health, socio-economic status, and other potential vulnerabilities and needs. Social workers collected this data using a variety of disparate procedures and stored it in a range of ways, from Excel spreadsheets to hand-written reports. This meant that building a picture of citizen needs was complex and lengthy. 

The lack of a central solution made every step of planning care and providing help to citizens more time-consuming and error-prone, and it prevented social workers from pulling together a chronology of care for any given citizen. It also kept the Council from assessing how factors like housing issues, economic conditions, or political developments all converged to affect a resident’s wellbeing. Hundreds of complex processes had to be carried out from referral to planning, which required a great deal of checking across multiple disciplines. Without a holistic view, social workers faced the risk of failing to provide care to vulnerable people and allowing problems to build before they were addressed. 

Andy MacDonald, the Director of Customer Services, saw this as a need that could be addressed with technology. He masterminded the adoption of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service as a platform to unify how social care data was collected, entered, and accessed by Aberdeen social workers. The end goal was to create a unified picture of citizen needs, care history, and status to lead to faster and more accurate care.

Tailoring a precise solution

While Dynamics 365 Customer Service was a powerful solution from the start, it couldn’t just be deployed without putting customers and staff at the heart of the redesign. “The team of social workers had in many cases been using the same system for 20 years, and they had a way of working,” MacDonald explains. “Our goal was to have the solutions designed around the needs of our workers, and Dynamics 365 Customer Service allowed us to do just that.”

The Council put together a new system wherein all information collected by social workers is entered into a central database, which records both the history of care and updates everything automatically as well as traces relationships and interactions between the individuals being cared for. Using this system also allows the information to be readily accessible not only to the social workers but to police, medical professionals, and other potential helpers in the care of citizens.

Aberdeen City Council also benefitted from working hand-in-hand with Microsoft, a relationship that MacDonald describes as being one of equals. Rather than Microsoft simply fulfilling orders for software or trying to take control of the entire process, he cited the commitment and willingness to work with Aberdeen City Council demonstrated by Microsoft. The company listened to the Council needs and provided feedback as necessary, developing a relationship that enriched both the practices of the Council and what Dynamics 365 Customer Service could facilitate.

Once the solution was fully rolled out, social workers immediately found their lives made easier by having all their data available in one place and in a unified format. As MacDonald says, “With Dynamics 365 Customer Service, our social workers can create a chronology and a clear record for people in need in just minutes. When you have a concern for someone’s state, having that information available is crucial.”

Comprehensive benefits for a comprehensive system

Workers can now assemble care reports on citizens in minutes using Dynamics 365 Customer Service, saving more than two million pounds a year in labor costs from saved time and effort. The constant availability of this historical report also means that care can be planned more effectively and faster.

Social workers, medical practitioners, and police officers are able to see what citizens had needed in the past and would likely need in the future, as well as the connections between citizens across multiple vectors. The Council improved its average handling time for a single case by 218 minutes, leading to over 11,500 new referrals and over 3,000 new assessments every single year. Moreover, social workers are now able to be more active in handling the issues of Aberdeen’s vulnerable population, acting before problems arise rather than simply reacting.

Under UK law, residents are entitled to a full history of Aberdeen City Council’s information about them upon request. The new system makes this process quick and easy, as the report process is now automated through Dynamics 365 Customer Service and requires minimal extra labor to be provided to citizens.  

Moving forward to greater service

Aberdeen City Council isn’t resting on its laurels. Educational psychology is a new addition to the data stored in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and will be fully incorporated this year, adding more data to relevant chronologies. Moreover, there are plans to allow people under care to add in useful notes and information, making them more active participants in the ecosystem.

Aberdeen City Council has embarked upon a three-year program of further improvement with Microsoft, taking a whole-systems approach and extending the Microsoft platform to do so. The Council’s end goal is to modernize council services and reduce administrative costs. This includes plans for deploying machine learning to help predict needs both immediate and ongoing, helping social workers be even more proactive in caring for vulnerable people.

Other cities within the United Kingdom have noticed the success of the Aberdeen City Council collaboration. MacDonald says he has already fielded calls from others across the country interested in Microsoft technology as a way to improve the response time and information available to social services. “What’s really attractive is that we haven’t just created a single point solution for social care, but for managing citizen needs, and other organizations can make use of that solution,” he says.

By working with Microsoft, Aberdeen City Council has transformed its operation and given its workers greater insight into the vulnerable people that it seeks to help. Creating a single comprehensive chronology of care enables not just better care but insight into what might be coming next, helping to treat people before they reach a crisis. And further developments will only help dedicated public servants to offer more to the people in need and improve the standard of care across the board.