It is ludicrous for social workers to complain about record-keeping
John Freeman was director of children’s services for Dudley Council from 2005 to 2008, and is a former joint president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. He writes in the Guardian:
The use of IT systems has not always been easy, and there is a legitimate area for debate around how case records should be developed, and how technology can improve practice. But proper records are an absolute requirement.
The third issue relates specifically to social care and safeguarding. Cases where there has been a tragic outcome are reviewed in order to learn lessons. It is important that records are available. And a theme of these reviews has been that tragedies have occurred as a consequence of ineffective passing of information between agencies.
The soon-to-launch ContactPoint children’s database is not perfect, but it has been designed to balance the two requirements of security and ease of use. The need to share the information between agencies is surely self-evident.
Time spent on record-keeping is not wasted. It would be a tragedy if the debate about the detail was allowed to obscure the general need for a proper system for recording the actions of social care professionals.
November 5th, 2009 at 14:49
If ContactPoint has such good security, why did HM Government refuse to publish the full report of the security audit it commissioned from Deloitte?
ContactPoint will make children’s details instantly available to at least 390,000 people across England and Wales. How can this possibly be said to be “secure”?
November 6th, 2009 at 15:07
Sorry but how does the need for social workers to keep detailed records, which can be shared amongst their colleagues and managers equal a need for a giant database with records of all kids in the UK accessible by hundreds of thousands of civil servants?
Yes social workers need reliable data storage but as a database administrator I know that the number of errors rises exponentially with the number of records, especially if many of the records are very rarely used or reviewed.
This whole piece is a straw man argument for yet another government database which is not required, is over reaching and inherently insecure and intrusive.
The addition of all children in the UK (bar those children who are clearly more equal than others) to a single database accessible by so many is not a ‘detail’ as described, but an outrage.