Supporting Vulnerable People at Huntingdonshire District Council

Thank you for your interest in the SAVVI case study of how Huntingdonshire District Council engaged with the SAVVI method to design how they will support vulnerable people.

Executive Summary

SAVVI, a Scalable Approach to Vulnerability via Interoperability, is a data project that aims to support early identification of vulnerable people and households, and to make smarter interventions and referrals. To do this, SAVVI defines an iterative model process that councils can use to ‘find, assess, and support’ people in need. SAVVI pulls together practical guidance, frameworks, standards, templates and resources in an online playbook to support every stage of the SAVVI model process.

This is a case study of how Huntingdonshire District Council engaged with the SAVVI method, during 2021, to design how they will support vulnerable people. The purpose of the document is to share the Huntingdonshire experience to inspire other councils looking to adopt a similar SAVVI-style approach to finding and supporting vulnerable people in their area. The case study is structured in sections that follow the stages of the SAVVI model process to enable readers to understand where each stage of the Huntingdonshire project maps to SAVVI.

This case study will be of particular interest to: project teams who want to find and support people in need; data and digital teams who want to handle and share data to a reusable standard; Information Governance teams who want to ensure that data is being shared legally, ethically, and transparently; and performance and BI teams who want to evidence that a project is effective in reducing hardship. SENA (Societal Early Needs App) is Huntingdonshire District Council’s project to develop a solution that aims to reduce the overall vulnerabilities of Huntingdonshire communities by promoting improved take-up of third sector services to reduce the future demand on statutory services. The SENA initiative focuses on three of the six stages of the SAVVI model process: ‘Assess’, ‘Support’, and ‘Report’.

Huntingdonshire District Council conducted an earlier phase of the SENA programme to explore how they might build cohorts of potentially vulnerable people using existing data in a risk model. The council started researching and prototyping from 2018; this highlighted various ‘data asks’ where existing data was needed to feed into a Risk-Index. Ultimately, the project found that the Information Governance required to identify vulnerable people, was a significant blocker to progress. At this stage of the project, SENA was not piloting the SAVVI process. This case study nevertheless retrospectively revisits this earlier stage of the SENA project because it maps well to the SAVVI process ‘Find’ stage, and provides useful learning for readers to consider how a similar project could benefit from adopting a SAVVI approach.

In working up a ‘service blueprint’ that gives an end-to-end experience for customers to be assessed and then provided with local support options, SENA has validated parts of the SAVVI Process, and helped the project to understand where the SAVVI Process, Standards, and Information Governance products can be extended to promote a national ambition for early identification and smarter interventions. In particular, SENA has shown that, to succeed, robust Information Governance support is required. This validates the need for the SAVVI IG Framework, SAVVI Data Sharing Catalogue and other practical IG tools that SAVVI has prototyped to support councils working on a vulnerability project.

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SAVVI - Case Study - Supporting Vulnerable People at Huntingdonshire District Council.pdf

2.2 MB

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