Coronavirus: coordinating local support for the vulnerable

Last week, we built a Community Response platform to help connect people who need help, to volunteers and organisations wanting to provide it.

We made a call that, in a time of unprecedented need, coordination around the vulnerable would be critical — between informal volunteers, the voluntary sector, local government and primary care.

We knew that some vital voluntary sector organisations were already struggling. Our food banks, normally staffed with many volunteers over 70, were hugely compromised. Our local talking therapy service already had a 10 day wait. Remarkable informal volunteering groups were starting to struggle to stay organised, and had limited connectivity into formal sectors.

Central government was focused on creating an army of NHS Volunteers for the extremely vulnerable, but we wondered how the much larger group of vulnerable people could be well supported — the many over 70s that needed food and prescription collection, those living alone without support, those without digital access. What would happen when a mutual aid volunteer came up against more complex issues and needed to help with access into more formal or specialist support? What about the places in our area where a mutual aid group hadn’t sprung up. Would informal groups start to run out of steam in 6 weeks time?

With the anticipated surge of need, we decided it was vitally important to try and rapidly establish a handle on things. Being platform thinkers, and users of modern technologies, our instinct was to design and build a way for informal and formal support to be built around people needing help. Well coordinated community response was about getting all the assets on the platform and orchestrating them as well as possible. We wanted to avoid volunteers and organisations tripping over each other in some places, and avoid gaps elsewhere.

Case management was needed, not just online forms and a shonky back end.

So what have a built?

A request for community support service, that can be filled out by anyone for someone in need. We are asking our coronavirus telephone support agents to use it, partner agencies, our own front line teams, mutual aid groups and the voluntary sector.

A register to volunteer service, that can be filled in by anyone wanting to help in the effort. We can upload lists of volunteers from elsewhere, and we are working on a corporate volunteering scheme to on-board furloughed workforces.

With the simple questions we ask, we know who is isolated and who has urgent need for food, which neighbourhood they live in (we have 9 neighbourhood teams and cases flow straight into neighbourhood lists), and where their nearest volunteers are (Google Maps API).

By collecting volunteer DBS or photo ID — though not mandatory at the point of registration — we can on-board volunteers very quickly and with assurance. We know if a volunteer is self-isolating but can offer remote support such as “someone to talk to”, whether they are currently available, and how many hours they can help each week.

We have neighbourhood team leads, and “connectors” who review need (with a quick call to the person) and review and allocate available volunteers. They can easily see all the cases they have, and the volunteers available to them.

Volunteers themselves have an easy view of their tasks, and can provide notes back to us against the case.

We have a maintained service directory, enabling us to refer people to voluntary sector organisations, and we have given those organisations their own caseload view, with an ability to extract the data. We have built a first version of “capacity” so that the organisation can tell us how many referrals they can take.

The first version of the community response service took 48 hours to build and release and is a testament to our amazing digital team and the platform approach we have taken as a small local authority.

A fast blog post, plenty more that could be said, but I hope it’s useful.