Building healthier, happier communities
A digital team, formed of citizen developers and traditional IT staff, are providing low-code enabled Innovation-as-a-Service for the council’s evolving requirements.
Project highlights
- Provided simple, robust onboarding for new services and service providers
- Created personalised portals to enable patients to see all communications in a single place
- Improved information sharing between all agencies dealing with individual patients
- Forecasting the need for services and measuring their effectiveness
- Improved tenant services with housing repairs
- Agile development for waste services
- Delivered improved asset management systems
Innovation-on-sea
Deep funding cuts have forced local government to find efficiency savings to maintain service delivery. Every local government council is facing changing lifestyles, an aging population and operating under a widening funding gap.
Delivering services in a new way can provide the answer. It also brings a new set of challenges. It’s the route that Adur & Worthing Councils decided on.
Systematic redesign of digital services
Improving operational healthcare
The first project they dealt with was social prescribing.
It is estimated that 27% of GP appointments could be avoided if better technology was used to coordinate between GPs and services. Patients suffering from social exclusion, debt anxiety, poor diet or lack of exercise are often responsible for repeat appointments, using valuable GP time. If these underlying problems were handled through other support services, overstretched GPs could focus on patients with complex medical conditions.
The Coastal West Sussex Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) decided take to action. Now, with consent from the patient, the GP can refer them to a Social Prescriber.
Connecting people with local support
Adur & Worthing Councils, West Sussex County Council and the CCG partnered to set up a new scheme. “Going Local” aimed to get people out of GP surgeries and refer them to non-medical community services instead.
This social prescribing approach is based around a team of Community Referrers, who assess patients’ needs and put them in touch with local support. To be effective, a solid tech platform was vital.
Adur & Worthing Councils had been using Liberty Create, our low-code solution, to replace legacy systems. They knew low-code could streamline processes for Going Local and their team were able to build the new digital solution, using Create, in just weeks.
It currently delivers:
- Case management for referred patients
- A service directory for matching patients to the right services
- Appointments, reminders and communications tools to keep everyone in the loop
Supporting smarter public services
Encouraging early results led the CCG to extend the pilot to a two-year scheme. It also set up a steering group rolled out a plan to start a service user group.
Adur & Worthing Councils went on to bring Going Local to the Netcall Community AppShare as an independent Create accelerator. They were the first local government community member to do so, and it is now available to other councils using Create to download and customise.
Supporting smarter public services
Encouraging early results led the CCG to extend the pilot to a two-year scheme. It also set up a steering group rolled out a plan to start a service user group.
Adur & Worthing Councils went on to bring Going Local to the Netcall Community AppShare as an independent Create accelerator. They were the first local government community member to do so, and it is now available to other councils using Create to download and customise.
A low-code transformation
The Adur & Worthing digital team, formed of citizen developers and traditional IT staff, was now ready to turn their low-code skills to other projects.
Providing low-code enabled Innovation-as-a-Service for the council’s evolving requirements, they tackled the next series of issues:
- Improving tenant services with housing repairs
- Agile development for waste services
- Delivering improved asset management
Watch our local government low-code case studies on Adur & Worthing Councils
Waste services
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The next major project the team tackled was team designing an end-to-end waste management digital service. It is comprised of four self service applications, which were built in 12 weeks.
- 7,000 self-service waste requests handled
- 70% of all bulky waste enquiries now online
- 61% "street scene" reporting now online
- 33% fewer disputes with the council over missed bins
- 33% fewer inbound calls of locals reporting incidents
Tenant Services
Using the Liberty Create platform, Adur & Worthing built a social housing repairs service which includes self serve appointment booking, operative scheduling and field work.
- 6,850 homes managed
- 17,900 repairs a year
- 24/7 availability
- 86% customer satisfaction
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Asset Management
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An asset management digital service enabling digital stock condition surveying, compliance monitoring and commercial estate management.
- 7,000 assets and properties managed
- 5,500 listed compliance tests
- Keeps assets, staff, tenants and public safe
- Vastly reduces missed deadlines
Developing a team of developers
Adur & Worthing wanted to harness the talent they had within the organisation to build a digital team that was able to understand and tackle the systems the council needed.
Meet James Bovington, who has moved to the Digital Team having previously worked as a Coastal Surveyor for the council.
Netcall is far from a faceless tech company – we’ve met several of the team in person. Knowing the people behind the product has made our ongoing communication fast and constructive, so the support is as efficient as low-code itself.
– James Bovington, Senior Digital Developer
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I’ve found the best things about Netcall’s low-code are how fast it is to build and that even ambitious end-to-end projects are possible. It’s intuitive and open, we can easily access data and connect to other systems. The forum on the Community is also fantastic – the Netcall team respond and contribute regularly.
