Co-designing an online referral tool for the International Family Tracing service
This blog post was co-written by Amina Hussein, IFT Operations Manager, Becky Lehane, IFT Service Manager and Vicky Houghton-Price, Service Designer
Over the last year the Digital Transformation team have been working with the International Family Tracing (IFT) service to address the way referrals are received and to look at how an online referral process might help to manage the growing waiting lists and alleviate pressures on teams. Find out how this journey started and why we focussed on referrals.
This month the North East and Yorkshire team began piloting our new online referral process with internal and external referral parties. A lot of work has gone into getting us to this stage, so huge thanks to Vicky Houghton-Price (service designer) , Melissa Manderson (digital transformation programme manager), Julio Peral (front end developer) and Lizzie Bruce (content designer) who have been brilliant in moving this project forward.
Becky Lehane, Service Manager and her team have worked incredibly hard with the digital team to prepare the material and content. It is also important to manage this type of change carefully with stakeholders. To do this the service team have contacted internal and external parties which refer into the service to communicate the way we will receive referrals going forward.
How we did it
Before we got to this point, there had been several rounds of prototyping and testing with users, but we were at the stage where we felt confident to develop the service for real. We set aside 2 weeks to nail down the details and build it for real.
The teams met most days for two weeks and held short, snappy meetings to move things forward with speed. We learnt a new “tech” language and were introduced to tools such as Miro and Figma where we were able to gather ideas, fears, hopes, challenges and solutions in virtual workshops.
We ended the 2 weeks with usability testing with potential referrers to test everything was running smoothly.
Myself (Amina), Becky and service co-ordinators agreed it was great to be part of the frontline team working with the digital design teams to create a user friendly process to access our service. We left hoping that the new process will improve the service user’s experience of accessing IFT, give useful information at an earlier point and help us to process referrals more efficiently.
It was fascinating to see how the process came together and we are excited that this could be the beginning of further digital improvements. Our roadmap for future developments included:
· Integration with our Casework management system (FLAnswers)
· Automatic text notifications for clients
· Translation into different languages to encourage self-referral
· A portal for service users to check progress on their case.
The pilot is planned for 3 months and reviewed every 2 weeks where we evaluate its impact on the quality of referrals, efficiency gains for service coordinators and what impact (if any) it has had on the waiting lists.
Update on the pilot so far
The North East and Yorkshire team have been using the online referral pathway since 1st March, and we’ve had some great feedback:
“I tried using the referral system with someone who wanted the tracing service. It worked extremely well, was easy to follow and took about 10 minutes. I was able to give a reasonable amount of information and I liked receiving clear information about what would happen next”
— External referrer
Referrers have been able to identify straight away whether the person they are trying to help could benefit from the service. Such as the referrer who told us ‘I had no idea that losing contact due to divorce was out of criteria’ and identifying those cases early on demonstrates the potential impact of this tool. Looking at the data we signposted 8 users who were actually needing Family Reunion support, not tracing, and 5 users to tracing services run by different organisations with different eligibility criteria. This prevents us and service users for investing resources when we can’t actually help.
A challenge we’ve had is working out the best way to upload referrals on to our CRM system. We’ve tried different approaches and are still figuring out the best way. Meanwhile we’ve redesigned the referral receipt that comes through to the caseworkers, so that it is easier for data entry.
The local team have also observed improvements themselves:
- Less referrals out of criteria
- No more encryption problems getting emails from social services
- Quicker to give someone a link than to take a phone enquiry
- Helps referrers and enquirers understand the service at an earlier point in the process
- The automatic email response is a better experience
It’s early days, but we are happy with how things are going so far and are making incremental changes as we go to improve the service before deciding whether to roll it out to other parts of the UK.
