Homelessness case progression management overview
Increasingly, a housing authority's success in driving down instances of homelessness is shaped by their expertise in supporting families and individuals who face multiple challenges, with the reliance on solid case management being seen as an essential tool in the provision of effective and coordinated services, where all data pertinent to each inquiry is captured and analysed centrally. When applied in this way, case management underpins a collaborative and planned approach to ensuring that every person who experiences homelessness receives the services they need in order to restore their lives. Civica Cx Housing supports a client-centred case management model, with all inquiry phases being compiled and controlled through dedicated tiles - Advice, Assessment Activities, Reviews, etc. - which are readily accessible to all staff members with assigned ownership. Depending upon the individual nature of a case, the contribution required from housing authority staff could be short term, as in the case of critical intervention, or more longer term, dependent upon an identified need for crisis intervention, perhaps relating to challenging circumstances surrounding the transition towards independence, or supporting chronic influencing conditions such as severe and persistent health issues.
A homelessness case is inextricably linked to the associated tasks that constitute the workflow path, which are in turn grouped together by activity, and define the end-to-end progression steps to be conducted by the owner. Hence, in reviewing the progression status of a case, it is important to take a holistic view in the context of the individual task elements. From an end user perspective, all assigned cases can readily be viewed and progressed via the 'cases and tasks' Home pane. This is in essence a 'to do' list, with real time information presented on the status of each case. Simply by double-clicking on an entry included within the list, an end user can launch and progress the case. To keep track of progress, any number of notes can be appended to each case, appearing as discrete entries within the relevant graphical timeline. Similarly, any number of file attachments can be linked in order to provide contextual background, and serve as a single point of reference for all related progression activities.
As each homelessness case is advanced along a defined path, all logical steps pertinent to its progression are accessible through the 'select action' function. As each function is applied - Take Ownership, New Category, Reassign Case, Close Case, Reopen Case, etc. - the status is updated and the permitted follow-on activities are revised accordingly. For instance, where automatic ownership of a homelessness case has defaulted to a specific role, any assigned member can assume responsibility for its onward progression by selecting the Take Ownership action. Once assigned, system validation rules ensure that this option is then no longer available for the active case category; instead any change of ownership would be achieved via the Reassign Case action. Once a case has moved from an 'advice and prevention only' category to one classified as 'homelessness', all inquiries and outcomes need to be completed within the legislated timeframe. From this point forward, the overall case becomes service level driven, which is calculated based on custom values recorded against two system parameters: Homelessness Case Assessment Target (Working Days) and Homelessness Case Assessment Warning Before Target (Working Days), which determine the target completion date for a case and also any advance warning requirement - used to trigger an alert prior to the target completion date being reached.
Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of homelessness case progression management, including:
In addition, separate help articles focus on the configuration of system parameters that are used to steer service level compliance for homelessness cases, specifically: