Recently in Feedback Category

CC Inform would like to introduce, Gary Brigden, our new webmaster to the CC Inform team. Gary will be involved with all things "techy" so if you have any ideas for developing the site, please send us your feedback! 

Gary until now, has worked on communitycare.co.uk, his new role will see him exapnding his role to include the development of CC Inform.  

A year on from our fledgling pilot launch, CC Inform has grown considerably. We have received positive feedback from CCI users and are busy introducing the site to local authorities across England and Wales.  

Over recent months, we have published:  

Reference manuals:

• Placement of children for adoption
• Teenage pregnancy
• Access to records for adopted people (pre-commencement regulations)
• Intermediary services (adoption)

Guides:

• Guide to anger management in children and young people
• Guide to fetal alcohol spectrum disorders
• Guide to bipolar disorder
• Guide to play therapy
• Guide to assessing and supporting non-abusing carer(s) in circumstances of reported sexual abuse committed by an adult in the family

Soon to be published:

• Private fostering
• Supporting children with learning disabilities through their life stages, including transition

The guide to PLO was also updated in April after publication in January 2008 on the site. so it's as up-to-date as possible.

Congratulations to Donna Phillips from Sutton Council on winning the Red letter day gift experience.

Inform’s publishing director, Trevor Parker, picked Donna’s name at random out of a possible 60 names. Donna was thrilled to receive the prize but with too many experiences to choose from, can’t quite decide what to go for. Donna, keep us posted!

We have now been to a few feedback sessions with piloters across the 8 local authorities, which is really fantastic. You are all very positive about Inform and can see its potential.

Some piloters have raised the point that you do not have time to logon to inform, but those who do, once they are on the site find it extremely useful. With the pilot phase nearing the end, we really do urge you to practice using Inform as your first point of call when searching the internet for information. Eventually, Inform will be a one-stop-shop for all your information needs.

Good news, we have published 30 more case law summaries on the site.
It has been brought to our attention that you would like to see a summary of the case in the search-results page before you click through to the specific case law. We think this is a really valuable comment and will be working with our development team in the near future to see if we can implement this.

The team have been really busy loading lots more practice articles covering all areas in social care, along with another reference manual on care planning and reviews for looked after children and a research review entitled “Therapy with children after sexual abuse, and the impact on non-offending parents and siblings”.

Remember, there are only a couple more weeks left of the pilot phase. If you can spare some time, to send back any more comments, as ever, we will be truly grateful.

Many thanks!

Thank you to everyone who has submitted their feedback survey, there are still quite a few who still need to fill in their forms, do this before Friday (10th) and you will still be in with a chance to win the red letter day gift experience to the value of £250.

Here are a few comments from piloters in their own words…

"CCInform is an ambitious yet desperately needed initiative."

"I really think the site is fantastic, I can’t believe that it hasn’t been done before. I appreciate that the site is work in progress, but the information contained so far would take hours to find if just doing a general search on the internet."

"In terms of quick access to reference manuals, case law, and practice guides this site is wonderful. I have already found it extremely useful in forming my assessments and evidencing arguments made to courts and other professionals. As more content is being added all the time the site can only improve. I very much hope that my local authority will purchase this… A social worker’s dream, answered!"

We really appreciate all your comments. We know it can be very frustrating when your searches return no matches. We do have more reference manuals on their way but due to our strict policy of not publishing the manuals before they have been peer reviewed, it does mean delays occur. We apologise profusely for this, but hope you understand why we follow this policy.

Two more reference manuals have been published this week:
• Children living away from home
• Domestic violence: Working with partner agencies

Along with two more research reviews on:
• Placement arrangements in adoption
• Female genital cutting

This week, we commissioned an expert in the field, Dr Andrew Durham, to write a reference manual on sexual abuse and four research reviews covering the following key areas:
• Processes of sexual abuse and why children and young people find it hard to tell
• Issues relating to impact of child sexual abuse on female victims, male victims, disabled victims, black victims
• Therapeutic work with children and young people who have been sexually abused
• Females who sexually abuse

We are listening carefully to all the feedback you give us and endeavour to meet your needs.

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.