Wolverhampton City Council

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Wolverhampton City Council

The Bereavement Centre chose to work in partnership with Fujitsu to produce a detailed model defining what data concerning each death needed to be captured and how it should be interchanged between Council departments and agencies so that the Bereavement Centre Application is as seamless and effective as possible.

The Challenge

Coming to terms with someone’s death is never easy. And the situation is not helped when relatives are left with the unwelcome prospect of having to notify a myriad of public organisations to register and record the death.

To alleviate this burden Wolverhampton City Council developed the idea of the Bereavement Centre - a single point of access where a range of organisations could provide a co-ordinated service, bringing together procedures and documentation and sharing information to reduce the burden, on the bereaved.

In line with the Council’s strategy to enable electronic delivery of its services by or before 2005, an obvious step was to share notification of the death electronically between council services and partner agencies, so that customers only needed to "say it once, prove it once".

The national e-Government Pathfinder scheme, which funds Local Authority Partnership projects so that they can then be made freely available to others, offered an opportunity to put this into practice.

The Solution

Wolverhampton City Council had already made a strategic commitment to developing new systems, using Microsoft .NET technology, to simplify the building of e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) compliant systems. However, it recognised at an early stage of the Pathfinder bid that it did not possess all the necessary skills and experience to achieve the ambitious aims of the project alone.

The Council, therefore, chose to work in partnership with Fujitsu to produce a detailed model defining what data concerning each death needed to be captured and how it should be interchanged between Council departments and agencies so that the Bereavement Centre Application is as seamless and effective as possible.

To gather this information, Fujitsu undertook an in-depth study of the way different organisations process death notifications, interviewing departments and partner agencies to map information flows and processes and identify any issues relating to consent. A detailed process flow analysis document was then created and circulated to many local authorities and interested parties for evaluation, comment and approval.

To ensure compliance with the e-GIF, a Draft National Date of Death Schema and associated documentation was also produced and submitted for approval to GovTalk, which helps the public sector, industry and other interested participants to work together to develop and agree policies and standards for e-Government. Phase one of the Bereavement Centre Application has now been developed and enables death notifications to be forwarded to Housing Benefits via secure e-mail. This facility will soon be extended to include other internal agencies such as Social Services, Local Taxes, Housing Management and West Midlands Pension Fund.

In addition, Wolverhampton is in the process of negotiating phase two of the project, which will allow notifications to be sent to central government and private partner and voluntary sector agencies. It has also trialed the use of video conferencing to link the Bereavement Centre, Local Hospice, Local Health Centre and the Crematorium.

Lynn Bibb, Pathfinder Project Manager at Wolverhampton City Council, says, "The Pathfinder timescales dictated that the project had to be completed by April 2002. This only gave us a very limited amount of time in which to move the initial project from development to a working environment. The fact that we achieved this and now have an e-GIF compliant technology infrastructure is thanks to the tremendous work undertaken by Fujitsu, Wolverhampton’s ICT Section and the Bereavements team. It was a true partnership based on an excellent working relationship."

The Benefits

The Bereavement Centre Application has enabled Wolverhampton City Council to enhance the level of service provided to the citizens of Wolverhampton by improving the interaction between the Council, its partner agencies and customers.

Lynn Bibb comments, "Thanks to the detailed analysis and process mapping of the information flows surrounding death undertaken by Fujitsu, the new bereavement system not only saves customers time, but gives them the assurance that the Council is taking responsibility for sending the appropriate information to the appropriate office so that the affairs of the deceased can be settled at one point. As a result, the Council’s customer satisfaction results show that 98.4% of the people registering a death rated the service as good to very good or excellent."

Comments received as part of the survey include: "It was a great help to deal with all the paperwork in one place. I hope that this system will stay and be put into practice in other boroughs. It took a lot of stress off us at such a sad time in our lives."

"It was helpful to me, having all the appropriate agencies available to take details and not having to ring, write or visit them."

"Excellent idea. We found everyone so kind and helpful. It all ran so smoothly from one department to another. Well done - a credit to Wolverhampton."

For the Council, the new system for information sharing has also reduced the number and complexity of its back office processes and enabled it to speed up the notification process to its partner agencies. "Wolverhampton's Bereavement Centre is an excellent example of effective joined up service delivery," adds Lynn Bibb. "It is a user-focused, single access point that brings together services from various parts of the Council and central government. Its underlying .NET technology can also be re-utilised to support our aims for the electronic delivery of services in other projects."

The fact that the Council can share its experience with other interested local authorities is another big plus as Lynn Bibb explains, "The value of the Pathfinder project comes from the lessons learnt and we believe that this project has enabled us to learn a great deal that will be beneficial to other authorities."

The Implementation

The original bereavement database, which was developed in-house by Wolverhampton City Council, was initially migrated to a SQL Server database. This was then further developed using Microsoft ASP.NET, making it a browser-based, thin client application that can be deployed on an intranet or over the Web and is fully e-GIF compliant.

Before going live, a proof of concept system was piloted together with the evaluation process over a period of three months by running it concurrently alongside the existing bereavements database, with users mirroring records on both systems.

The Expertise

With over 30 years experience of supporting the needs of government departments and local authorities, Fujitsu is actively involved in the Pathfinder scheme, contributing both technically and financially.

It also has a well established relationship with Wolverhampton City Council, having previously designed and project managed the roll-out of a Windows 2000-based network infrastructure.

Lynn Bibb says, "We value the close working relationship that we have with Fujitsu and, with the push for e-enabled services before the 2005 deadline, we are looking to further show our commitment to Fujitsu as being one of Wolverhampton’s leading business partners."