David Wastell, professor of information systems at Nottingham University Business School, believes the decision to replace paper files with electronic records in social care was arbitrary and ill-informed.
Read the full story, which includes a link to the Prof's article.
Does anyone else mourn the loss of paper case files?
in mental health we are just going thorugh the change from paper and computerised files to just computers, it's nice writing in the casenotes with a pen, and it feels better having everything in front of you in a paper file rather than just a computer screen. it's not easy to know if you have missed some information on the computer system as in the paperfiles you can physically see what is there, with the computer you have to know where to look for things.
however the benefits of having computer files is that the out of hours crisis team can have access to all the information they need on someone rather than it being locked away in a dusty filing cabinet.
Daniel Lombard:Does anyone else mourn the loss of paper case files?
I can only imagine someone reminiscing so fondly about them has never had to spend hours standing over a hot photocopier to ensure that all four (or five or more) siblings have copies of the documents and recording pertinent to all of them on each volume and copying CP or LAC paperwork so there's a current one on the newest file as well as the file when it was written and the many other mindless chores associated with those blessed items?
Or indeed had the unpleasant task of picking up a case following an incident that has led to a serious case review and having to argue over the need to actually have your files because you're trying to run care proceedings at the same time as someone wants to audit them all the other side of the local authority?
In other words, good lord no. I wouldn't wish for paper files again.
paper files *shudders*
Recently, I had the wonderful job of going to another LA to view the paper files on a family of 7 siblings. What a nightmare! The worst thing I found was the illegible handwriting, it may aswell have been in chinese
Paper files are awful. We moved to a computerised system a few years ago and i never look back!
"I can only imagine someone reminiscing so fondly about them has never had to spend hours standing over a hot photocopier to ensure that all four (or five or more) siblings have copies of the documents"
No - now ICS will kindly make us write a report for each child rather than photocopy the one holistic report for the paper file
pika: No - now ICS will kindly make us write a report for each child rather than photocopy the one holistic report for the paper file
lol. ain't that the truth.
also, in the LA i'm in, we have both paper and computer files. obs/running sheets are all on the system - whcih is great. but we have to have copies of everyting else (care plans, court reports, letters, faxes) on the paper file. paperless files are a myth.
pika: "I can only imagine someone reminiscing so fondly about them has never had to spend hours standing over a hot photocopier to ensure that all four (or five or more) siblings have copies of the documents" No - now ICS will kindly make us write a report for each child rather than photocopy the one holistic report for the paper file
Depends on where you work, as not all ICS systems are the same - initially there was a requirement for individual reports (nice idea as children are individuals but often shoddily done) but that seems to be on the wane in most places and many systems have the ability to copy stuff over.
The main problem with both paper files and ICS is when the local authority is exponentially more interested in hitting performance indicators than having an understanding of what the job of being a s/w actually entails and how technology can make it easier rather than harder...
Adult services in the LA I work for have just moved to 'paperless' records. Its a joke. We fill in a paper form to send with any letters etc that we receive that have to be scanned - 1 piece of paper becomes 2. We also send order forms for scanning - again 1 piece of paper becomes 2. Any emails sent need to be uploaded to the system as well as typing a record into our observations on the computer to say the email was sent. This and many more frustrating features make the whole thing hard work and very time consuming. I much prefer a paper file that I can flick through to find the info I need - not perfect but better than electronic records. I can see a real Safe Guarding disaster happening as it seems very difficult to view information.
Though we use ICS , paper files are still very much in our office
Moose hit the nail on the head, the powers that be are far more interested in hitting performance indicators than they are in the fit for purpose useage of ICS
Someone said that they used to do one assessment on a family and copy it to all files. how can you just do one assessment on a family with a sibling group? ALL children are individual and have different needs/strengths so surely assessments should be focused on that particular child? (albeit some of the assessment will be the same)
People have been mentioning how the computer system adds paper work but thats just because of your LA policy on this issue. Any documents we fill in by hand, like a parents assessment, need to be scanned into the system but we just put the client name on the document and put it in a folder in admin to be scanned by one of the admin staff and saved to the clients file. Easy.
Basicly paper files are often hard to read, harder to get hold of, easily damaged or destroyed and slow down the process. Digital files are not always perfect but they do have many behefits over paper.
Also, lets be honest, the biggest advantage of digital data storage is it can more easily be monitored and checked up on to make sure the work is within standards. For a manager its a click at their desk instead of going to the file room, sighning out the file, looking through it and signing it back in.
"We speak, and the word goes out beyond us, to consequences and ends which we had not conceived of." - Gadamer
I can type and my handwriting is awful, so I find it much easier to record electronically than on paper. And I prefer that everyone can see all the records at their desk without having to wait for admin to send files from one end of the city to the other, they're accessible out of hours or from any council office.
What I don't like is that when I want to look for a specific casenote relating to something done a couple of years ago, for example to find out who ordered a specialist chair, what the make and model is and who we bought it from, it's much much harder to go through several screens worth of electronic case notes than it is to flip through a paper file.
Electronic case notes - easier for recording, harder for reading.
I also think they have created a bit of an expectation that all notes will be written up straight away. For example, when we still had paper records, if you did a visit at the end of the day and there was a bit of a crisis and you notified your emergency duty team, you'd go home. You wouldn't go back to the office to write up the paper file that night, and it wouldn't have made any difference if you did because the emergency duty team would have been in another building miles away and would have had no access to it anyway. Now, there seems to be an expectation that everything should be in the electronic notes straight away, regardless of the fact it's 8pm and you'd have to go find an open council office and write it up and then go home.
Paper files were great, I could carry them around in the car, lose them, misfile them stop the emergency duty team having access to them, alter them and scribble indechipherable notes on them!
These computer systems are rubbish, sharing information around easily, auditing who did what and when and allowing information to be written in once and reused. I'm glad to see that a Professor of IT thinks so!
In fact why just go back to paper files? I preferred having stone tablets, you could leave them in the rain, read them without glasses and they were difficult to alter so providing a built in audit. We need a Professor of Paper Systems to point out all these failings with paper files. Things were never the same when we got papyrus and don't start me on telephones and internal combustion engines. They're the devil's work. I only ever travel on horseback and use the Royal Mail for my communications.
I wonder how many of you technology driven social workers actually stop and think of the nuances of your assessments when you are busily displaying your keyboard and PC skills. Indecipherable and infuriating paper records may have been but you at least they allowed a step back. How jolly that to questioning or suggesting that technology may have some shortcomings brings out the cliché of the Luddite slur. No doubt you all have your Blackberries and your Kindles and you are never a heartbeat away from Twitter and Facebook. Undoubtedly this makes you perfect to work with “kids”. How trendy and oh so so metropolitan of you. I suggest that you actually read what the Prof. says, before you display so magnificently and so haughtily.
I'd never thought of North Yorkshire as being particularly Metropolitan and in my 50's myself, not particularly trendy - still skinny lattes alround then!
If you like paper what's to stop you printing off whatever you need to see and stand back from, then correct / change it on screen? That's how I work with Word documents - what's the difference?
You can have the best of both worlds. Once the information is entered it's there to be reused, printed, shared, whatever. If you don't like the forms get them changed, we just need to agree on what we actually want and that's the hardest part. In my experience if you can tell the supplier what you want they will provide it, too much time is spent moaning and not constructively improving what is there in my opinion.
(PS I don't have an iPhone, Blackberry, Kindle and have never Twittered. As for Facebook, I was pressed to join to keep an eye on the antics of my two kids at University, I have never knowingly contributed to it.)
PPS I did read what he said and I think it's wrong for the reasons above.
Interesting that we are concluding so differently from the same article. You say that one of your objections is that information notes were easily lost and that entries could be illegible. Leaving aside my own experience of the vulnerable encryption of electronic data, the Prof. contends that available research indicates that “These” new features" need to go beyond hackneyed favourites such as free text searching. Useful possibly, but of limited real value for practice, especially when so much of the electronic repository contains scanned (and therefore unsearchable) material, sometimes misfiled, typically unindexed, and often of poor visual quality” How does this improve on legibility?
My point was that the use of the keyboard and the instant recording of information often produces recordings that do not have the depth of other forms of recording which require time to transcribe. But I’m just a humble practitioner, what would I know. You of course may be reassured by his observation that “a set of paper forms was taken and translated into digital format, but conceptually we still have a set of paper forms”
As an agency worker I have worked a few places over the last couple of years and been totally infuriated by the differring electronic record databases. Apart from the system asking me stuff on a don't need to know basis I then have to make sure the electronic tedium is duplicated in paper form. I would like to be able to mourn the passing of paper files but we are nowhere it yet.
It's a bit like ringing someone to see if they got your email.
Exactly so!! It's very tempting to take One-nil's contribution as living proof that people don't read electronic documents, as effectively as paper ones! If you read the actual article, not the headline, my argument was not that we should go back to paper; it was an argument about design, that "so little design seems to have been done to take advantage of the facilities offered by the new medium". And, indeed, to compensate for its intrinsic limitations.
The following paragraph (edited out of the published piece) gave the following example:
"Computerized databases are more than electronic filing cabinets; they provide a radically different storage modality, allowing synthesis and integration of information in ways that are not possible with paper. In a well-designed database, the same information can be retrieved and displayed in different “views”; on paper, only one presentation is possible, the original. Imagine a set of Initial Assessments for a child, and let us assume that the social worker wishes to build up a longitudinal profile of the child’s educational development. On paper, the process is laborious: each assessment must be consulted in turn, with the information sought and extracted from the middle of each document. Storing the information as a set of fields in a database, on the other hand, allows either representation, the full assessment at a particular time or the long-term educational view, to be displayed at the press of an electronic button"
Would this particular facility be useful? I don’t know; I proferred it merely as an example of what can be done, taking full advantage of database technology. Other possibilities also spring readily to mind, e.g. the ability to provide both family AND individual records from the same information, without redundant repetition of common details.
Electronic is best? Only if design work is done carefully and diligently, following a user-centred approach. That was my case......
I think the problem is that whoever decides which electronic system to purchase generally has no idea of the varying needs of the wide range of people who will make use of it. We use SWIFT. The only good thing about it is that we now have single electronic records accessible to all social work staff - the system itself is awful. It's clunky and non-intuitive. It's awkward to navigate, reading or searching through notes is a horrible process, and it's certainly not fast enough to be called SWIFT. It's better than nothing, but it's not £14 million worth better.
I also use swift and agree that it is anything but!. It provides a single record which anyone can use but it still doesnt ensure precise and accurate recording especially when staff are expected to use it prior to any training. Collegues oftern find themselves becoming trainers themselves rather than see staff struggle. Unfortunatly the inputting is now seen as to be so important that it becomes the standerd by which we are judged by our managers rather than the quality of our work with the service users themselves.
One problem is the quality of the information, whether on paper or pc. If information was inputted by skilled admin people, properly trained and valued, half of the problems described wouldn'y occur. Proper indexing, the ability to copy and paste between siblings' files, properly laid out letters and all that boring stuff would make a huge difference to any format. How many Directors input all of their own stuff without admin support?
Getagrip: One problem is the quality of the information, whether on paper or pc. If information was inputted by skilled admin people, properly trained and valued, half of the problems described wouldn'y occur. Proper indexing, the ability to copy and paste between siblings' files, properly laid out letters and all that boring stuff would make a huge difference to any format. How many Directors input all of their own stuff without admin support?
Can you please qualify what you mean by inputting? Because while I would agree that there is a role for admin staff in some recording, admin staff should only be doing admin-related recording. Recording case notes and practice-related information should always be the responsibility of the worker. Recording notes is the professional's job, not the admin worker's job, and changing from paper to electrickery doesn't change that.