Dominic Campbell (Director FutureGov) :
Patchwork is a really simple app that allows frontline practitioners to connect to one another, to communicate effectively and to collaborate so that they can actually form a team around a client and enable them to provide better services to that client.
Janet Vickers (Director General, FACS):
A lot of our systems to collect kind of current information about who workers are and where they’re located and how to get in touch with them are poor . They’re often paper copies that are outdated the day after they’re printed. We really were desperate for a system that helped us to connect the system of support around vulnerable people.
Lisa Alonso Love (Director, Reform Design and Delivery):
People from Health, people from NGOs, people from FACS are really getting into using the tool and being able to know which one of them is working with a child.
Graham Lane (Manager, Central Coast Youth Health Service):
For our service we provide a range of health services for young people across the whole central coast region. Patchwork offers a great opportunity because some young people come along in quite a degree of chaos and the next thing is working out what’s important to them and then connecting them up to the services in accordance with both their identified list of needs but also with a health worker’s list of needs.
Lisa Alonso Love (Director, Reform Design and Delivery?):
We’ve tried it on the central coast over the last six months and they’re loving it. We want to give other districts the opportunity to try it and see what that means in a different place with different geography, different services and see how it works there as well.
Donna Argus (SHFL Project Manager, Murrumbidgee):
And often in a rural area we have services that are involved with that family who do not live in the community, who may in fact travel more than two or three hours to get to the community to work with that child. So something like Patchwork can assist those people living outside of the community to have a visual representation and an accessible one where we have an excellent directory and details around who is involved with that family, who is involved with that child. If we want to keep the child and the family at the centre of our practice we need to know who is working with that child.
Janet Vickers (Director General, FACS):
The remarkable figure for me is that we
’ve got close to 50 agencies, separate agencies, already involved in Patchwork – which you can see already starts to weave this service system around our clients and in that space we’ve got nearly 400 what-they-call agents, which is individuals in those
50 agencies who are on the Patchwork system and utilising it.
Graham Lane (Manager, Central Coast Youth Health Service):
A big important part of working with young people is their confidentiality and making sure that we’re treating that with respect, their privacy, so whenever we list someone on Patchwork we always consulted with them and got their consent to do that.
Madeline Gill (Child Protection Caseworker):
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Patchwork video - TRANSCRIPT
I’ll be really honest with families and say that I’ll be using a program like this, I’ll be trying to link in with the services that they’re working with. They’ll often nominate people for me to look for.
Patchwork is a way that we can find these services and start working with them collaboratively at a really early stage in the casework, and it’s really taking us away from our desks and making phone calls trying to track these people down … so it’ll save us a significant amount of time.
I didn’t need any training to learn how to use it. You basically create a username, you login and you put your client’s details in there – and then there’s different tabs which you can select to get different information.
Janet Vickers (Director General, FACS):
The beauty of Patchwork is that it’s the embodiment of the kind of culture that we’re trying to build across government, and across government and non-government agencies – which is “Can we just start to talk to one another?”
Amanda Hills (Manager Casework):
I think it’s a fantastic linking service for service providers and obviously it’s beneficial to clients because it streamlines the service support that they receive so there’s not a lot of different services doing the same role. It just allows every service to know what the other person is doing.
Donna Argus (SHFL Project Manager, Murrumbidgee):
We had caseworkers today who came along who hadn’t heard of Patchwork, and sat down and automatically could see how Patchwork is a tool that they could integrate into their practice.
Janet Vickers (Director General, FACS):
I think you’ll see over time it’ll just become part of normal business. People’s first question when they get a new client will be : “I wonder if they’re on Patchwork?” and I think they’re gonna get into the system and check who else knows this client before they even start their engagement. Which is, I think, revolutionary.
[Screen shot: Safe Home for Life: Child Protection Services. NSW Government, Family &
Community Services]
[Image fades. Video ends.]
Duration: 4:17
SOURCE: http://www.mav.asn.au/policy-services/social-community/Pages/patchwork.aspx
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