Category: Government

Grassroots Podcast: Initiative Brokers, the Big Society and making community wishes come true

Corian Huhenholtz-Sasse and Rinske van Noortwijk
Corian Huhenholtz-Sasse and Rinske van Noortwijk

Meet Rinske van Noortwijk and Corian Hugenholtz-Sasse  – they make wishes come true.

– (dead link)

I met them both in Rotterdam, invited through the wonderful Maurice Specht to speak to the Association of Initiative Brokers ( @inimakelaar )  in Holland, organised by Rinske.

Two days before, Tessy Britton and I had been in The Hague speaking to senior civil servants from Dutch central government.  Read more

#madwd Health and Social Care session, some notes from making a Difference with data

Here are some key points from the session on Health and Social Care (check som of this – facts not all checked)

  • Data from the Care Quality Commission,  conversations about scarping data from the site, told that individuals can query the site and find individual care homes, but it’s not set up so you can systematically compare.  Will shortly be available as raw data on scraperwiki. Individual reports are only available as pdfs – which causes a huge amount of work for data users.
  • Reports have lots of words in them – you cant compare all 28 outcomes.
  • Issues between health and social care – mainly to do with battles over budgets in local authorities plus changes in the structure of the health service.  Inspection regime is changing.
  • Huge problems with health service and different council services being able to share information. Systems are not compatible – and proprietary formats.  One local authority talked of 100 systems – no indicators any more so no more performance staff.  Who would port this information out.
  • Illustration of how local government officers suddenly have access to information when their councils publish information as open data –  they can find with google in a way that they couldn’t with internal systems.

  • Have we read the information revolution strategy from the department of health?  Big themes on choice – hospital you go to, you gp, treatments.
  • For social care people want to know how nice the staff are.
  • Car parking is a particular problem with hospitals
  • Private contractors provided by the four big companies that can’t be FOI’d and even joint ventures –  some people said that you can FOI if they’re delivering a public service.
  • From January local authorities are expected to publish new contracts.
  • Re health…discussion on the potential value of combining data re health outcomes with some information on taxi firms – quality fo service from transport etc etc.
  • How do you collate all this information together – individual contracts, care homes quality.
  • Supporting people ( eg ) outcomes data (now stopped )  captured information for 200,000 people who risked being homelessness and the national insurance numbers –  shows the revolving door problems re social services, drug action team etc etc.
  • Worrying theme of data sets being less available because of cost cutting.
  • Do we need contracts which require transparency.
  • Is there consistency in licensing from some of the government open data sites?
  • NHS in general
  • Should GP practices release performance data etc
  • Problems of protecting the most vulnerable people from con artists etc.
  • Data protection act still stands.
  • Problem of the benefits or otherwise of revealing detailed health data.

#madwd Making a difference with data: Cllr Darren Johnson

Darren Johnson – London Assembly Member and Lewisham Cllr – green Party

Notes on his comments at Making a Difference with Data.

  • data is essential as part of our scrutiny role.
  • we find getting hold of data takes up a good chunk of our time – and our support staff.
  • generally we have problems – officials often reluctant to release raw data to members and meners of the public
  • I’ve started to request that all data I ask for goes on the London datastore so it’s shared [great thing to do]
  • changing the way we make policy – all data we use to make policy is getting shared, which speeds up the analysis of the policy by scrutiny easier.
  • Sharing tree information across London changed tree planting approach – but three years ago it is still like pulling teeth to release the data again.
  • need open and complete information on publicly owned land.
  • on average it costs £300 to answer and Assembly members question.  With open data fewer questions will be asked and so less admin needs to happen – he hopes.

A quick and simple public sector reform to save some money

Please government can we stagger end of financial years?  Can Local Government end theirs in April, Central Government in July, the NHS in October, etc etc  – can publicly funded organisations like social landlords do something similar too?

Public money can and does get wasted in the unruly rush to the end of March.  You could improve that.