Fujitsu unites Queensland child safety divisions
Fujitsu unites Queensland child safety divisions
The Queensland Government has assigned Fujitsu and Onyx Software Australia to help it improve information management as part of a statewide initiative to reform child protection and youth justice delivery.
The integrated client management system (ICMS) will be used as part of the Aus$44.4 million, three-year Information Renewal Initiative, which aims to improve the way information is managed to support the safety and well being of children in Queensland.
The ICMS is designed to make it easier for staff to share information with other government agencies because child safety practitioners need to get information from many different sources to effectively assess a child's needs.
In order to develop a holistic and integrated support or case plan for a child, the departments need to exchange data and transactions with other agencies including police, health and education.
Paul Flemming, the executive general manager of business solutions for Fujitsu said: "We have been contracted to unite a number of disparate systems inside the Department of Child Safety so that staff can find and update information under one unifying system.
"Onyx Software will provide the customer relationship management application so that all staff can access the same information. We hope this system will also underpin the building blocks for the system to develop so that more information can be handled centrally to help make better decisions."
Fujitsu Australia and Onyx Software Australia won the contract to improve the management of information in the department after an enquiry was launched which criticised the way information was managed within the Department.
The results of the enquiry demanded the development of a better system. The phase of the initiative is to great the first ever Queensland statewide unified system for sharing information about children. The second phase involves creating the functions that will enable people to update information on individual cases.
Flemming added: "The problem with the old system is that updates on cases used to be made manually. Case reviews used to take a week to be updates, because the paper work had to be typed into different systems, whereas we are aiming to have these cases updated instaneously, so staff can get hold of new information at the earliest possibility."
Systems currently used by the Department of Child Safety and Department of Communities have significant issues involving duplication and inconsistency of client records. Practitioners also need to enter information multiple times in different systems.
It is hoped that the new systems will reduce workload by automating the case management process and will allow better decisions to be made for the health and safety of the children.
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