July 2007 Archives

Work-life balance out of snyc? A never ending pile of cases to be dealt with?

Fancy some respite?

We’re offering one lucky piloter the chance to WIN a red letter day gift experience to the value of £250. All you have to do is fill in our feedback survey form which was emailed to you on Friday 27th July. Return this to us by 10th August and you will be automatically entered into a free prize draw. Remember, you’ve got to be in it to win it!

It should take you no more than 5-10 minutes out of your day to complete and return to us, all feedback will be greatfully received.

This week, as promised, we published two reference manuals. One on female genital mutilation and another on care proceedings. We have also published four guides to…:
• Tax and benefits when you adopt a child
• Tax and benefits when you foster a child
• Shaken baby syndrome
• Foetal alcohol syndrome

You can find our “Guides to…” in the practice section of CCInform. Are you pleased with these guides? Do they meet your expectations?

In addition, we are pleased to say, we are in the early stages of introducing CAFCASS to the pilot phase of CCInform. CAFCASS will be testing the service in 8 regional offices across the UK. Welcome!

With everyone on board helping us to develop this product, CCInform will be a truly great tool in your working lives.

Techniguru Dan says...

We've had quite a few requests to allow the saving of external links and pages in much the same way that you can save individual documents to your My Documents folder.

The great news is the browser you're using to view this page can already do this. Can we do a better job of reproducing this function than Microsoft (or Mozilla if you're using Firefox)? The answer, of course, is a big no! Ultimately you'll be better off using the tools the big boys have provided! Here's some links to step-by-step tutorials on adding and organising your favourite pages within your browser:

Internet Explorer 6 - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie6/using/howto/share/favorites.mspx
Internet Explorer 7 - http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-NZ/Help/fd70b0f3-290e-46e4-8a67-2715f494783b1033.mspx#E6C
Firefox - http://mozilla.gunnars.net/firefox_bookmarks_tutorial.html#Bookmarking_a_page

The first thing to say this week is a huge thank you to everyone who spared the time to speak to us on the phone last Wednesday. It was great to talk to you and to gather your comments and feedback on your experience of Inform so far.

We appreciate you are exceptionally busy and are eternally grateful for the time you put aside for Inform.

Our long-term goal for Inform is to ensure we create a comprehensive information service that will meet your information needs. Bear with us while we build our library of content. Our objective is to provide a one-stop-shop of relevant and up-to-date information.

We’re thrilled to say that we’re commissioning a new series of documents for the practice section called Guide to… The first two of these documents are ready to be published: one on Foetal Alcohol Syndrome and the other on Shaken Baby Syndrome. We aim to get these published to the site early next week. These subjects were suggested to us by pilot users, so keep your ideas coming in. We are listening to what you’re telling us and when you come up with a great idea we’re acting on it.

We have published more practice articles this week and are waiting for the go-ahead to publish three more reference manuals on i) Care proceedings, ii) Female Genital Mutilation and iii) Working with partner agencies in domestic violence cases. These should be up early next week.

The reference manual search has now been updated, and also as you may have noticed, we have added a coming soon tab to the left hand navigation bar. This provides an up to date list of the reference manuals we have commissioned. We’re thinking of adding a kind of traffic light system so you can see how close to publishing each reference manual, on the coming soon list, we are. Is this something you’d like to see?

YOUR DIRECTOR NEEDS YOU!
Next week, a survey will be sent to everyone piloting the site to gather feedback on the service. We will be using the information gathered from this survey to provide the director in your authority with the information they need to decide whether to buy the service for you beyond the pilot. It is only a short questionnaire and will not take long to fill in. There’s a prize draw on offer too, so thank you in advance for your time.

Another busy week on Inform and we have loaded more practice articles along with an additional reference manual on “Immigration legislation and policy”.

We have received really positive feedback from piloters so far, with some great suggestions on how you feel we could improve the site. One piloter emailed CCInform this week to ask:

“Would it be possible for information handouts to be put on the site about special guardianship, adoption, residence orders etc, that we could print out to give to parents, foster carers and other interested parties?”

We thought this was a really good idea and are testing it out in the Disabled children reference manual. We have inserted a new section called “Information for parents and carers” in the key resources part of the manual, use the quick links provided in the document to navigate your way to this section. Please let us know what you think.

This week, Alison, Sarah and myself, alongside our colleagues from Community Care magazine, organised a charity ball in aid of breast cancer. The night was a huge success, raising over £3,000 (and we’re still counting)!

The pink ball was our way of celebrating our achievement in completing the 13-mile moonwalk through London (in our bras) earlier this year, and to raise as much money as possible for such a good cause.

It hasn't just been party, party, party this week. We have published four more research reviews on: The impact of parental substance misuse on children; Serious case reviews; The transition of disabled young adults from children’s to adults services and Resettlement for refugee children and families and have published a second reference manual on adoption entitled “Recruitment, preparation and assessment of prospective adopters in England and Wales”.

In addition, quite a few of you have said that you would like us to look at the feasibility of incorporating a message board to the web site where practitioners could ask other users for information on a variety of topics. This could perhaps work as a discussion forum and would be an easy way to communicate with other users and share ideas and expertise. What do other users think? Is this something you would welcome? Please let us know.