A flexible system to support Domestic Homicide Reviews
Summary
Domestic Homicide Reviews
A Domestic Homicide Review (DHR) is conducted, most often by a Community Safety Partnership, to review the circumstances in which a person aged 16 or over has died as a result of suspected abuse, violence or neglect at the hands of a person they were related to, a person the deceased was or had previously been in an intimate personal relationship, or a person who was living in the same household. The process of a DHR encourages multi-agency input to determine what lessons must be learnt from the tragic event, an understanding of the nature and context of the homicide, and ultimately the ability to identify how similar circumstances can be avoided in future.
The review process can often-times rely heavily on administrative, manual tasks such as distributing, chasing and consolidating agency forms, organising meetings, assigning and tracking progress of actions and collating feedback from Independent Author reports to name just some aspects of the manual, resource intensive process. The process of a Domestic Homicide Review taking place also comes with time restraints; the decision to conduct a DHR should be confirmed by the Chair of the Community Safety Partnership within one month of notification, at which point a further six-month timescale is given for the review to be completed and the resulting report to be published. Therefore, there is a consideration to be made when it comes to time pressures related to this particular review process.
In addition, when collecting data and responses from agency partners, the information is more often than not spread out across different emails, word documents, spreadsheets and even various paper documents too. Not only does this weigh heavily on the aforementioned time resources, but information being stored in emails and across paperwork also compromises the security of this sensitive data.
QES Case Review System
The Case Review system is part of QES’ Holistix Safeguarding Suite enabling local, regional and national safeguarding teams to collect, interpret and gain value from multi-agency information, in order to continuously improve the safeguarding of children and vulnerable adults. This is not just an opportunity to understand where there are problems, but to enforce change and prevent potentially avoidable and often tragic incidents from taking place again.
The system has been built across a wide range of applications to meet the requirements of various case review processes; with national guidance, terminology, forms and statutory timings altered depending on the application i.e. reflecting the statutory guidance published by the Home Office for Domestic Homicide Reviews. QES are committed to evolving the system to reflect new national guidance, and continuously learning from our ever-growing user group and by attending relevant conferences and webinars.
Features Overview
Below is a brief overview of some of the Case Review features:
-
Intuitive and easy to navigate system including user-friendly interface, compatibility across multiple devices, personalised dashboards and more
-
Initial notification and agency involvement forms are securely completed on the system, with an automatic form consolidation feature combining all details to display a comprehensive view of circumstances provided by multiple agencies in one centralised location
-
Meeting management feature supports initial organisation, managing attendance and the distributing of key information surrounding meetings (i.e. agenda, minutes, supporting documents, as well as lessons and recommendations determined from a meeting)
-
Lessons, recommendations and themes are recorded, updated and available for reporting within the system. The heart of the Case Review system is to identify learning, with a multi-agency input, to ensure safeguarding practices are constantly evolving
-
Action tracking and planning feature enables users to assign actions against people, link them to lessons and recommendations, establish deadline dates and monitor progress, ensuring there is an element of accountability involved in implementing changes to improve safeguarding processes
-
Automated chronology feature orders an unlimited number of multiple agencies’ timeline of events into chronological order, with the ability to filter by agency, user, significance and date range
-
Independent Author reports are accessible on the system with a comments facility alongside and the ability to share with team members. This enables collective input which facilitates the completion of the document to its best standard, at which point a publicly available link to the form is created for publication
-
Comprehensive real-time reporting dashboard gives a visual representation of real-time statistics on common themes, lessons learnt, agency involvement and lots more. This allows safeguarding partnerships to react to emerging issues more quickly and identify where improvements must be made
-
Secure and GDPR compliant with two-factor authentication code, no sensitive data leaving the system, and multiple user roles ensuring information is only seen by those with granted access permissions
Download in PDF format
