Summary - DHR
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.
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 (including Action Plan template, Home Office data collection template and more). 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.
Key Features
Below is a brief overview of some of the DHR Case Review system's features and functionality:
Multi-agency forms
Initial notification, agency involvement and IMR forms completed securely online, all in one centralised location
Meeting management
Supports administration of meetings, including recording minutes, document uploads, distribution of invites and more
Lessons learned
Record lessons, themes and recommendations throughout to support learning and inform the improvement of local services
Action plan template
Assign actions, link lessons & recommendations, set deadlines and monitor progress using Home Office Action Plan template
Chronology feature
Mass chronology upload feature supports partners in inputting timeline of events, and consolidates all entries
Use collaboration to develop overview report with multiple users able to input at any given time
Overview report
Reporting dashboards
Real-time statistics on common themes, lessons learnt, agency involvement, demographics and much more
Data collection template
Pre-populates data recorded via the system into the Home Office data collection template to save significant time
Robust security
Two-factor authentication, multiple user roles with varying permissions and GDPR compliant throughout the web-based system