Elmbridge Borough Council's journey to adopting the standard for wellbeing
Melanie Bussicott, Head of Community Support Services and Nikki Wade, Project Manager, both from Community Support Services at Elmbridge Borough Council.
The problem
We wanted to create an online wellbeing resource for the residents of Elmbridge, helping them find local services. We joined the pilot run by the Local Government Association, which was developing the open data standard and therefore chose to adopt it for our project.
The process
We are still working through this process, as the pandemic slowed progress of our project. However, the main challenge we found is that much of our existing data was at organisational level, not service level so there were many gaps in terms of information about services, eligibility, attending times and other variables which are part of the open data standard. Adoption of the standard requires us to collect and maintain more data than we did previously.
Challenges
The main challenge will be to expand and maintain the quality of our online resource so it is useful to residents and frontline professionals. Initially, we are involving key staff within our department and the wider council in this. We will then reach out to organisations within our local community, engaging them in adding and maintaining information about their own services.
Benefits
We anticipate that adopting the standard will help make our online resource a rich source of information for residents and frontline professionals. The classification of services by needs, circumstances and types will allows professionals such as social prescribers to match their clients to services that will support their needs.
What we learned
They will need to consider the format and structure of their current data compared to the standard.