Our commissioning of victim care services was driven by the findings of our needs assessment and a desire to:
- Be victim centred
- Use local services that are already supporting victims across all the victim care pathways and protected characteristics
We knew that we wanted to create more efficiency, effectiveness and engagement in support services. To that end , we have create a victim care unit in the Police Force that makes contact with victims based on their victims needs assessment and then, with consent, refers them on to the relevant organisation to offer support.
Our whole model was based on not procuring one service to fit all, but to create secure referral pathways to a network of organisations that would have gone through numerous due diligence requirements in order to be accredited as part of the network.
The multi agency approach recognises that the impact of crime might be different for individual victims and is not necessarily related to the type of crime they have experienced and the desire to engage with different services is essential to helping victims to cope and recover.
We felt it was inappropriate to filter all victims into one provider that had little evidence of referring on according to additional needs.
In order to enable us to embrace the value that the local diverse landscape of the VCSE has to offer, we needed to be confident that we could utilise a system for the secure exchange and storage of victim information. This requirement was an absolute and required an innovative IT system that would allow: Secure levels of different access depending on whether an individual user, organisation, victim care unit or OPCC. A system that allows VCSE organisations with different levels of IT capacity to still be able to access the relevant referral information for their victim Swift, relevant information to be referred from the VCU and can be monitored for actual activity within the requirements of the Victims Code of practice.
We knew about the MY RJ system and felt that this structure met our requirements.
We approached MY RJ with our needs and a requires to use MY RJ as a platform for a bespoke system called MY VCU which would enable us to by each organisation ;
- Track acceptance of referrals
- Number of active cases
- Number of completed cases
- Reasons for closing a case
We were also very keen on prompting organisations to ask clients to undertake an outcomes survey at the end of their engagement with an organisation. This system allows that data to be uploaded to clients records.
The system has been an invaluable part of the solution to enabling a network approach to victim care that has at its heart diversity in terms of choice for the victim but is underpinned by an efficient secure, referral mechanism Without the VCU system we would not have been able to respond to the needs of victims in the same way and believe it is a vital tool to enabling multi agency work for the benefit of others.