MOSAIC

Overview - What is the MOSAIC service?

Since 2007 there has been an integrated health and social care service for disabled children in Camden called MOSAIC (“making our services accessible in Camden”). The service operates a single point of access and referral for children, young people, their parents/carers and practitioners who wish to refer a child to some of the services which it provides.

This replaced several points of access and referral systems which operated previously with the aim of making it easier for families and professionals to navigate through all the different services that a disabled child may need to meet his/her needs. The service provides assessment and support services for children aged 0-19 with severe and profound disability and/or complex health needs. The service is multi agency and multi disciplinary comprising practitioners from:

Camden Council’s Children, Schools and Families, Inclusion Division (social work team, Family Support)
NHS Islington (dietician and speech and language therapy)
Royal Free Hospital (Paediatricians, Physiotherapy and Occupational therapy)
Tavistock and Portman Trust (child and adolescent mental health professionals)
Camden Provider Services (Team leader, specialist health visitor, therapy assistant and administrators)
In addition, voluntary organisations are contracted to provide short break services, home learning and family support.

The service operates out of Kentish Town health centre in Kentish Town, North London. “Joint intake” meetings are held weekly with all relevant professionals in attendance and a Team Around the Child is identified at the point of a referral being accepted. Many referrals into the service are submitted via the electronic common assessment framework (eCAF) system which is used across Children’s services in Camden. Other referrals are accepted on a paper CAF. During the assessment process a Lead Professional is allocated so a family has a single point of contact for any queries.

The challenge

The challenge for the service is to move from multiple practitioners in multiple professions (fifteen different disciplines in all) and organisations who use different client/record recording systems to use of fewer systems and a common approach to record keeping about a child’s “case”.

Project scope

Since the creation of the service the service head Amanda Fernando has been able to get all health professionals who are not direct employees of NHS Camden Provider Services on to honorary contracts with NHS Camden Provider Services. The main driver for this was to move health professionals from recording on several different local systems which other MOSAIC professionals could not access to all health professionals updating one child record on NHS Camden’s RIO system. The intention is to have the health record on NHS Camden’s RIO system and the social care record on Camden Council’s Frameworki system so there are only 2 electronic systems containing the child’s information.

The service has developed their own record keeping protocol which sets out the approach all practitioners in the service should take when recording information about the child or young person so there is consistency across all disciplines.

The MOSAIC service has been sharing information between professionals at 'Team Around the Child' meetings but in order to enable the service to have practitioners from health and social care accessing each other’s records directly the service needed to have an information sharing protocol between the key parties.

Because the health practitioners are all honorarily contracted to NHS Camden Provider Services the protocol only needed to be between NHS Camden Provider Services and Camden Council. Previously in 2006 an overarching information sharing protocol was signed between the Trust and Local Authority and this contained a template service specific information sharing agreement (SSISA). This SSISA was used as the format for the MOSAIC service information sharing protocol.

The protocol sets out the reason for sharing, how information is shared, and access to it audited. It contains the service’s record keeping protocol as an appendix. It also lists at a high level the type of data shared and sets out the current situation which is designated administrators query RiO and Frameworki on behalf of health and social care practitioners. In the future when decisions have been made on the health and social care roles who can have reciprocal access to RiO and Frameworki this detail will be added as a further appendix to the protocol.

Key contacts

For further information on this please contact either Ruth Jones 020 7974 1640 (ruthjones@camden.gov.uk) or MOSAIC’s service head Amanda Fernando 020 3317 2200 (Amanda.fernando@camden.gov.uk) or Ari Garboggini, Information Governance Manager 020 7685 5954 (Araripe.Garboggini).