Blaenau Gwent Council works with Atos, Infoshare in data analytics project to identify vulnerable citizens

Welsh council is leading a project to manage data across five public sector organisations with aim of decreasing likelihood of a citizen becoming vulnerable

Blaenau Gwent Council is working with French IT services firm Atos and UK-based data management company Infoshare, in a data analytics project which aims to identify vulnerable citizens.

The council is leading a project to launch a data intelligence system that will manage the data across five organisations: Torfean County Borough Council, Caerphilly County borough Council, Aneurin Bevan University Health Board, Gwent Police, and Blaenau Gwent Council itself.

The system was developed by a team of people from six local authority organisations and the initial results have been shared with Blaenau Gwent Council so that it can consider the next steps of implementation.

"We are a huge step closer to delivering early intervention and better targeted local services to our most vulnerable citizens. Improved intelligence can help us to be more proactive in the way we deliver services to individuals," said Dean Thomas, service manager of the strategic transformation team and resilience at Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council.

Thomas explained that by intervening as quickly as possible, it can potentially decrease the likelihood of a citizen becoming vulnerable.

"[For this reason] working to get better intelligence is extremely valuable for quality of life but also for managing resources effectively," he said.

Each one of the local authorities involved holds data on people separately, and with the help of Atos and Infoshare, which provided data matching services and the software to process multiple data sources, all of this data was able to be collated and viewed together, in order to provide a much clearer and more detailed picture of a citizen and their needs.

Recently, the council held a workshop which brought together a number of senior management stakeholders across the Gwent Region in order to work out how the data sharing system could be implemented with partners.

The workshop identified a number of immediate actions to be taken forward which would help to add value to the project and future-proof the system.

The framework for multi-agency data sharing is now being considered for implementation.