Cambridgeshire and Peterborough COVID-19 digital response

Cambridgeshire County Council and Peterborough City Council COVID-19 Coordination Hub July 2020 Contents

These following document outlines Cambridgeshire’s (CCC) and Peterborough’s (PCC) digital response to COVID-19 from March to the present day and beyond...

● Keeping the council working ● Information provision: websites ● Community support ○ Online directories ○ Requesting help ○ Responding to requests for help ○ Newsletters ● Proactive contact with shielding residents ● The Shield system ○ Development ○ Stats ○ Iterations and aspirations ● Community response teams ● Data sharing ● Data, management information and business intelligence ● For fun - an A-Z of some of the requests we have received at the hub Keeping the councils working

Remote working Over 2,700 members of staff are connecting to the CCC network via A recent survey went to all CCC and PCC staff, and 2,378 VPN, compared to approximately 700 people per day before lockdown. people responded. Staff have been using Teams and Skype to hold remote meetings and also to stay in touch with their teams. Of those, 87% of staff have been working from home successfully and 1% have been working in an office or other Many services have quickly adapted to offering their services remotely location. - from supporting people with Learning Disabilities to providing remote music lessons. The survey was overwhelmingly positive about working from home. 79% of people said that they have been supported in Democracy developing a flexible working pattern that helps them. 84% of The councils quickly adopted Zoom for conducting council meetings people said that they can see that working from home has a real and also shares them on YouTube as well as information videos in role in how we work in the future. This may mean that the way multiple languages. we traditionally work has changed for the long term as a result of COVID-19.

Supporting staff ● Communications: 2 COVID-19 emails were sent every day to all staff as well as weekly hub newsletter, Friday Focus. The staff survey asked about the success of these communications and 96% staff said they have been useful or very useful. ● Identifying staff who needs to shield: forms were developed for HR to identify members of staff who are shielding and to record the numbers of cases of people testing positive for COVID-19. Information provision: websites

New web content Web & Digital teams worked closely with the COVID-19 hub to understand the demand and contact from the public in order to create relevant and helpful COVID-19 pages on the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough websites. This helped to provide support and information to residents and local communities.

Content on the websites includes information about health, government advice, changes to council services, safety (domestic abuse and scam awareness). The new pages link seamlessly to both the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough community support directories and to the “I need help” form which enables people to request specific help.

Since the new content went live in March 2020, the Cambridgeshire COVID-19 pages have had around 4,000 unique visits per week and around 2,000 unique visits per week to the Peterborough pages. Information provision: websites

New web content Additionally, in Peterborough, new web pages have been added to the Peterborough Information Network.

The pages are: ● Adults COVID-19 ● Families Information Service COVID-19 ● Information for young people coronavirus ● Local Offer COVID-19 ● Local Offer for Young People Coronavirus ● SEN and Inclusion COVID-19

The pages are updated on a daily basis with a wide range of resources, including easy read information.

Since the new content went live in April 2020, the pages have been viewed regularly and have been the top search results on the entire Peterborough Information Network. In May 2020, the words “COVID-19” were successfully searched for 5,222 times. Community support: online directories

The need Stats At the start of the COVID-19 crisis, we saw communities pull CCC: 180+ COVID-19 community groups and 900 views a day (at together and establish some fantastic groups that were able to help the height of the crisis) people with shopping, collecting prescriptions or telephone PCC: 130+ COVID-19 community groups and 1,340 views in May befriending. 2020

The most critical need we had for the directory was to store all of these groups centrally and make them easily searchable, so that people were able to find COVID-19 support groups nearest to them.

What did we do?

● Offer space where people can find the support they need ● Create a central and easily searchable platform for community/volunteer groups to advertise their offer ● Contact community/volunteer groups that were not already on online directory and support them

● Quality assure and moderate the listings to ensure they were

geographically tagged and contained crucial contact As part of our recovery work, we have been exploring how we can information continue the remarkable efforts of community groups and ● Fast tracked work to make improvements to locational volunteers we have seen during the COVID-19 crisis. searches, categorisations, site wide banners and data reporting Community support: requesting help

Email Telephone One of the first things the hub did was create an email address so ● The hub created a new team of call handlers, all remote that it could start receiving contact from individuals, organisations workers, using the Avaya software at home to receive calls. and businesses about COVID-19. It soon became clear that the main ● Scripts and processes created so that call handlers can reasons for contact were either “I need help” queries or “I want to signpost to online resources, community offer and complete help”. “I need help” forms on their behalf.

Stats (30th June 2020) ● 5000+ emails resolved ● 7000+ phone calls received ● 2700+ I Need Help forms fulfilled

“I need help” process ● Online form to capture help requests from individuals and organisations ● Back office dashboard for hub coordinators to investigate and triage requests Community support: responding to requests for help

The team Stats The hub coordination team is the front line of the COVID-19 hub. Of the 2,737 requests for help received to date on the 1st July, 2,271 The team has grown from 4 FTE on the 24th March to 11 FTE on the of these have been dealt with by hub coordinators either by referring 15th May. the request to a council service or by organising a food parcel. The 372 requests received by non-shielding people were passed to the What they do relevant district council to provide support. ● The team deals with 120 contacts each day via the mailbox, telephone and “I need help” dashboard 37,572 government food parcels delivered / 2,911 hub food parcels ● They triage the requests for help based on the type of help delivered required and the person’s vulnerability ● They create the lists for food deliveries for the next day and pass to the red cross who go out and deliver food parcels to the most vulnerable the next day, even at the weekend. ● They manage the redeployment of council staff and volunteers to meet the demand created by COVID-19

Challenges? ● Referral stats ● Unexpected nature of the work, from standard requests for food/medication to worries about a zip line, wasps/squirrels, drainage etc. Community support: newsletters

Regular newsletters have been produced detailing the work being undertaken by the COVID-19 hubs.

There are two newsletters - both entitled “Highlights from the Hub” - one produced by the county-wide hub and one produced by the Peterborough Hub.

The newsletters, which are both emailed out to a wide range of stakeholders, as well as being uploaded to the council website and Peterborough Information Network, include information on support and resources available to the public and focus on the excellent work being undertaken. Proactive contact with shielding residents

The service Recording the contact The COVID-19 hub has a responsibility for the 30,000 shielding ● The service went live recording on spreadsheets but by the residents in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. All of these people 27th April, a new system went live, built internally by LGSS recieve a letter or an email from the hub to advise of our contact Digital, which enabled the team to record relevant details when we are made aware of their vulnerable status so that information about the shielding people onto a customer they know how to contact us if they need help. As well as this, on the record. 20th April a new service went live - calling all of the shielded people ● The team also gained the ability to record information about to check in on them, find out how they are and submit any requests for help such as needing food, medication or other urgent supplies. the person’s wellbeing with every call made as well as enable them to follow the processes in place for escalations if The team needed. The team is made up of 130 case officers and 17 case managers ● The new system also facilitates the ability for case officers to responsible for regularly calling the 7,500+ shielding people who manage their workloads by easily being able to find the advised that they need help and do not have access to essential customers assigned to them supplies or the care they need. ● As it was built internally, we have been able to iterate on the minimal viable version of the product and continue to Process improve it based on the changing needs of the new service and user feedback. The management team of this new service devised processes for the new team - such as scripts to follow on calls, what information needs to be captured and what to do if the person does not answer the phone. The Shield system: development

Design Development The system was designed out in a couple of days based on the The Shield system was developed by LGSS Digital in 5 days and was processes created by the call management team and spreadsheets fully operational by the 27th April. that had been devised. Training and user guides were developed as the system developed The minimum viable product was to be made up of: and training commenced on the same day.

● Customer record (made up of fields taken from the More information about how this was achieved is here. registered vulnerable list and fields that would be manually edited) The system has already undergone 3 iterations of improvement. ● Customer uploader tool with associated rules ● User roles - case manager and case officer ● Teams - made up of a manager and case officers ● Assigning customers to case officer ● Call log case type for logging detail about each call that would be made to each customer ● Ability for other teams to add notes, escalate a customer. note action taken. ● Archive customer ● API for real time reporting The Shield system: iterative improvements

Increasing the use New Functionality The Community Response teams in each of Cambridgeshire’s local authority In May, it was identified that not all shielded people wanted, districts went live 3 weeks after Shield was launched. This meant that Shield or needed, to receive a regular phone call and would rather could be expanded out and used by the new district teams, allowing the hub receive emails or text messages. to track what help and support has been provided across the whole county. Our latest iteration of Shield went live in June and involved Iterative improvements integrating our custom built CRM with the GOV Notify Shield underwent lots of minor, but important, improvements in the weeks service. following the launch. Most changes were in response to user feedback, to improve the user experience and included: This means that depending on a customer’s preferred method of contact, if they prefer a text or an email, the ● The customer record screen looked and felt ‘nicer’ and easy to use system will automatically send them a text or an email and ● Navigation between screens was made easier. create a log against their history to record that contact was ● Users were able to see customer histories and archived customers made. ● New functionality to list and administer teams of users We also have the option to send ● Created further data exports for use within the hub mass communications out to everyone if and when government advice changes. Community response teams

What they do The team ● The new service went live on 14 May. Local teams made up of redeployed staff, mainly library staff, and ● Carry out specific help requests that cannot be fulfilled by coordinated by the place coordinators in the districts of: the hub coordination team such as shopping for essential ● Huntingdonshire supplies and collecting prescriptions ● Cambridge City ● Advising on the different methods that people can use to pay ● South Cambridgeshire ● Peterborough volunteers who are shopping for their essentials ● East Cambridgeshire ● The hub coordination team refers to the local teams through ● Fenland the “I need help” dashboard ● The place coordinators update the customer record on the Aspirations for the service Shield system so that we have an accurate picture of the ● Helping people get online so that they can independently support provided to each customer source the help they need and access essential supplies ● Carry out light duties in the home such as odd jobs, changing bed sheets, light gardening, low level cleaning

Over 100 customers have been referred to the community response teams so far and have received the support and care they need. Data sharing

MHCLG shared a number of data sets with the hub, some of which were directly shareable with partners, some were confidential.

As part of the COVID-19 response, one of the challenges was to identify a cohort of those that would be vulnerable, not just to the direct effects of COVID-19, but also to the effects of the lockdown. This was lead by the District/City councils in discussion with a wide range of public sector partners and included the possibility of sharing data sets to contribute to a holistic overview of this vulnerable group. An Information Group was established with data leads from each partner to discuss this.

The hub set up a dedicated email address and redeployed a staff member to work directly with our Data Protection lead to manage the requests for data sharing that were being made by public sector partners.

Examples of data used to include:

● People with a care and support package from Adult Social Care ● Those who have assisted bin collection ● Disabilities Grants ● Homelessness Referrals ● Council Tax Reduction ● Households with children in receipt of Funded 2s ● Incoming Local Authority list of those identified as Extremely Vulnerable to COVID-19 Data Dashboards

The Business Intelligence team were able to receive real-time or daily information from the systems we put in place at the hub so that stakeholders can view and understand the current state of play across the different aspects of the Hub.

A daily summary of activity was also collated to support the Hub operations. A-Z - Examples of some of the requests the Hub has dealt with over the last 100+ days

A - phoning an ambulance G - gluten free food N - newborn nappies V - support for the victim of a for someone in distress burglary H - hearing aid repair O - heating oil B - finding a way to X - helping a lady access edible relocate a bed that needed to I - collecting a replacement P - support following a partial food after her cooker move to make way for medical inhaler demolition of a house due to exploded equipment an accident J - Y - specialist dietary needs C - transporting a deceased Q - that were heavily yoghurt pet to enable it to be cremated K - repairing the light fitting in based someone’s kitchen R - rubbish D - providing dog food disposal Z - concerns about L - laptops for children to neighbouring children E - emptying someone’s study from home S - sanitary items ziplining too clogged washing machine close to their filter M - moving a T - tree surgery property and fridge/freezer not social distancing F - Fish and Chip Fridays U - utilities top ups Thank you to our contributors

Kat Sexton LGSS Digital

Adele Gilpin LGSS Digital

Ed Strangeways CCC Information Services

Jacky Cozens PCC Adults and Safeguarding

Emily Sanderson CCC Transformation

Special thanks to everyone working at the Peterborough and Cambridgeshire COVID-19 Coordination Hub and to everyone who is working so hard remotely for the Hub and for the residents.