1625 Independent People (also known as ‘1625ip’) support young people in the south-west of England, mostly in Bristol and South Gloucestershire, and in certain neighbouring areas.
They provide a range of services: high-support live-in accommodation, shared housing, and independent housing with floating support. They provide specialist mental health support services as well as education and employment training. Their focus is on young people who need housing, and they also work to prevent youth homelessness by working in schools to provide peer education and raising awareness of homelessness.
Once central place for data
“We realised we needed an integrated system. Our ultimate aim was to integrate all our records for an individual young person into one system.”
120 + staff
It’s used by everyone across the organisation, from operations and support staff to housing, rents, maintenance teams, and managers
The organisation, has around 120 staff, which meant their data collection and reporting functions were not coherent.
Paul Hale, Business and Quality Assurance Manager 1625 Independent People tells us what In-Form has done for 1625ip.
“Staff had to carry hard copies of people’s files around with them physically. The system was difficult for consistent data entry, difficult for monitoring, difficult for reporting.”
What made things more difficult still: since the young people they help often use more than one service, and since these services are provided by different teams, there was no single place to keep track of any one person’s data.
“It made it very difficult to manage records.”
The scattered approach meant that time that should have been spent providing important services to vulnerable young people was instead used in coordinating their data. It was an inefficient use of resources, frustrating for staff. Something had to change.
“One hundred per cent of our young people benefit from the new system.”
Reporting with ease
1625ip gets its funding from local authorities, independent funding bodies and social investors. All commissioners and funders require reporting on the effectiveness of services against specification, so it is crucial for them to have clear, accurate, and coherent reports to show the value of their work.
Now the data is right there in In-Form, and instantly accessible, it makes generating reports easy: team-level internal reports, board, commissioning, funding and annual reports can all be generated from the same source.
“It allows us to report on anything we input, in any way we choose.
“What it’s ultimately done for us is to provide a ‘one stop’ resource for recording all our interactions with our service users.
Managing accommodation
Dealing with accommodation is a huge part of 1625ip’s work. Now that In-Form’s Rent module has become an integral part of the system,
“We have a much cleaner flow of communication internally and better information-sharing relationships with service users and landlords.
“We’ve got an integrated system, which is absolutely what we were aiming for.”
“It’s given us absolute confidence in our data, In-Form makes it easier to see where there are gaps in the data. Critically, we have a much better understanding of what the data is telling us.
We can see what we are achieving with young people more effectively than we could do before In-Form”.
Paul Hale, 1625 Independent People.
“I would absolutely recommend In-Form, I’m not aware of a better product on the market.”
Paul Hale, Business and Quality Assurance Manager 1625 Independent People
Next Steps
The organisation is increasingly interested in and required to evaluate the results of their work in entirely new ways. Thanks to In-Form, this will not present a problem to 1625ip. Since the system allows records to be built in different ways, Paul says he is confident they can evaluate their impact in new ways and meet current and new contract requirements.
