SODA

The Suffolk Office of Data & Analytics (SODA) is a collaboration between Suffolk’s Local Authorities, Suffolk Constabulary, and local NHS organisations.

These organisations all recognise that prevention is becoming ever more important as demand increases and effective prevention needs integrated approaches, so services, teams and individuals can collaborate, share data and co-ordinate efforts to meet challenges of complex and rising needs.

Providing the compelling reason to act – SODA creates multi-organisational, actionable insight from otherwise separate information, by joining up and analysing local data and where necessary blending it with other local and national sources. This integrated evidence base enhances decision-making, refines policy, and optimises service design and delivery, ultimately improving the lives of Suffolk residents. SODA’s work includes:

  • Information Governance – ensuring lawful information sharing.
  • Information Sharing Processes & Systems – ensuring safe information sharing.
  • Data Analysis – building evidence for better decision making.

Case Study 1 – Housing for inclusive growth in Gunton

Business Question: “What kind of housing development and what types of housing should we build on local authority owned land in Gunton?”

To answer this question SODA brought together a range of publicly available and local partner data and delivered a report, which highlighted the population profile, including age, health, care, education, and housing needs, in the Gunton area.

Use and impact of SODA report

The report was used to support the view that private housing and affordable housing should be key priorities on the site. It provided insight that there is strong demand over both the short and long term and, for example, helped the argument that housing is of higher priority than delivery of employment. The age and demographic data were:

  • used in inclusion of a retirement community scheme on the site.
  • discussed throughout the design and master-plan process, leading to some homes being built to a higher space standard to allow for future adaptation to support people to live in their own homes for longer.

The site has been designed to be a largely self-serving new settlement throughout its design process rather than an urban extension, which might look to rely on existing services and land uses and deliver just housing – all based on the issues of access to services identified in the SODA report. This includes the site having as much self-serving elements as possible, e.g., inclusion of retirement community, up to eight hectares of employment space, a primary school, including pre-school, a community centre and play area.

The report also supported conversations with NHS trusts in the area to see if development can deliver/support provision of health services thereby relieving pressure on the issues highlighted in the SODA report.

Case Study 2 – Sharing local death registration data

Impact of better data sharing

Suffolk Registrar saves time as only one report is shared with SODA. Previously, multiple reports were extracted and sent to different partners via email or in the post.

Suffolk County Council Adult Social Care teams now have access to weekly death registration data:

    • Timely notification of death of carer or close family member means extra support may be put in place to prevent or delay a service user needing more significant care in the future.
    • Better able to plan where best to place a service user in need of a residential care space.
    • Saves time hunting down information to deliver an effective safeguarding process.
    • Correspondence to self-funders stopped upon death, as incorrect continuation of contact can cause distress to relatives.
    • Less cost to relatives, in cases of deferred payment agreements, where interest can continue to accrue after a service user has passed away.
    • Charges for self-funders are stopped at the correct time – no issue for relatives having to contact the service to stop charges or deal with incorrect invoices.

Suffolk County Council Blue Badge team, and district & borough Benefits, Electoral Services and Housing teams now have access to ALL death registrations data, which gives them more information in a new workable format; this means

      • Ability to rescind Blue Badges in a timelier fashion and prevent fraud.
      • Officer time saved in identifying next of kin.
      • Correspondence sent to correct addresses.
      • Electoral Roll always up to date.
      • More timely review of Council Tax and Housing Benefit payments.
      • Potential distress to families of deceased who receive demands for payment, etc.
      • Shorter periods where housing is not available to new tenants.
      • Reduced loss of income from tenancies.

Case Study 3 – COVID ‘vulnerable’ persons data project

Business Question: “Can we identify individuals, communities, neighbourhoods that may be impacted disproportionally by the COVID virus?”

Following the outbreak of COVID-19, SODA was tasked by the Suffolk Collaborative Communities Board (CCB) to identify individuals and households who may be particularly vulnerable to the impact of the virus either clinically, financially, or socially.

SODA and partners put the necessary, lawful information governance in place to enable this project. SODA collated over 40 datasets from partners and added flags for each vulnerability (clinical, social, financial) to individuals based on information within the datasets. Individuals and households were matched using a combination of name, DOB and address and unique person / household IDs were created. All data was combined into one dataset, which was then anonymised for analysis.

Use and impact of SODA report

Case Study 4 – Understanding disparities amongst children & young people in Suffolk

Business Question: “Are there any disparities in the services Suffolk’s public service organisations deliver to children and young people?”

To answer this question SODA collated non-identifiable data on children and young people within social care services, within education, known to Police and to Youth Justice. This data was analysed based on ethnicity to understand in which services/areas children and young people from different ethnic backgrounds are over or underrepresented compared to their proportion within Suffolk’s general population.

Use and impact of SODA report

Following the publication of SODA’s report, the Suffolk Youth Justice Management Board set up a Partnership Group, which is now developing a joint plan to reduce disparities in services across Suffolk.

Case Study 5 – Evaluating local services around gangs, county-lines & criminal exploitation

Business Question: “How effective are our local, collaborative efforts in reducing and preventing children and young people being involved in gangs and county-lines and being criminally exploited?”

To answer this question, SODA has been using the Outcome Based Accountability framework to evaluate all work programmes in this area since 2019. On an ongoing basis SODA conducts interviews and gathers feedback through surveys, as well as information and intelligence from all involved services.

SODA also looks at costs and benefits of various elements of the Criminal Exploitation programme. In addition, SODA looks at those involved in any of the related work programmes to track the impact of interventions on their behaviour and interactions with Police, Youth Justice, Education and Social Care Services.

Use and impact of SODA evaluation

  • Understanding of cost and benefits in programme delivery has provided a solid foundation for ongoing partnership conversations around funding.
  • Secured local funding to set up Criminal Exploitation Teams in three locations across Suffolk.
  • Ongoing improvements to services around Criminal Exploitation.

Case Study 6 – Supporting delivery of Suffolk’s Serious Violence Duty Strategy

The Home Office enacted a Serious Violence Duty (SVD) on Police and Crime Commissioners, Police, Fire & Rescue Services, Local Authorities, Education, Health, and other partners in January 2023. These duty holders were asked to deliver a local Serious Violence (SV) Strategy in January 2024. The Suffolk SVD Partnership Group was formed of all duty holders and engaged SODA to develop Suffolk’s SVD Strategic Needs Assessment (SNA).

SODA conducted an evidence review of national sources to set the context for the SNA. This was supplemented by existing local evidence reports and profiles, as well as other aggregated data. All of this was used to provide a picture of the key SV risks and protective factors, such as mental health, school attainment, drug & alcohol misuse, A&E/Ambulance/Hospital data, etc.

Surveys and interviews were used to gather local case studies from all duty holders and other partners (e.g., from the VCSFE sector) – these were also used to provide a view about ‘what works’.

SODA collated and linked identifiable data on those involved in SV, this included recorded crime data, youth justice and probation data, as well as data from education and social care.

SODA’s SVD SNA was used by the partnership to develop its SV Strategy and pick specific interventions to deliver against the strategy.

SODA’s approach to developing a local evidence-base was recognised as a national exemplar by CREST Advisory, who had been commissioned by the Home Office to support areas in the development of their local SVD Strategy.

In February 2024, the Suffolk SVD Partnership commissioned SODA to continue the ongoing evaluation of its SVD Strategy. SODA is developing a dashboard to automate annual updates to the SNA and will also refresh the linked dataset to understand the impact of the partnership’s work in relation to the strategy. The partnership’s annual submission to the Home Office (due in January 2025) will be based on these SODA outputs.

 

Case Study 7 – Evaluation of Right Care, Right Person

Right Care, Right Person (RCRP) is an initiative implemented across police forces in England and Wales with the aim of ensuring that vulnerable people get the right support from the right agency. In particular, the initiative focuses on ensuring calls relating to mental health are dealt with by the right service, and the police are working in partnership with other agencies to achieve this.  SODA has been commissioned to assess the impact of RCRP in Suffolk.

Suffolk Constabulary started to implement RCRP in early October 2023. Phase 1 focused on calls to the police relating to concerns for welfare. In January 2024, calls relating to concerns around people leaving healthcare facilities were added. Calls relating to the transport of patients and calls relating to patients under the Mental Health Act or being treated voluntarily for mental-ill health have been included since April and July 2024, respectively.

The Suffolk System recognised that an assessment of the impact on external partner agencies would be valuable to understand the wider implications of RCRP and to ensure that members of the public are indeed receiving the ‘right care’.

SODA Approach

Taking Suffolk Constabulary call-centre data as the starting point, SODA identified which agencies/partners referrals were being made into by the Police. Call volume data from Suffolk Police and these partners are now collated by SODA and used to populate a dashboard available to all partners, this includes datasets from:

  • Suffolk Constabulary (primary dataset)
  • Suffolk County Council
  • Suffolk Multi-agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) data
  • NHS data (Emergency care data, 111 data, mental health admissions, and ambulance data)

Initially, SODA received data for the 5 years prior to the introduction of RCRP and since its launch has been collating monthly data from all partners.

The dashboard provides an overview of demand, how call volumes have changed (if at all) before and after the introduction of RCRP, and what the primary referral pathways are.

In spring 2025, SODA will provide a first evaluation and interpretation of data to establish any potential impacts of RCRP on local demand. SODA will follow up any potential changes in call/attendance volumes seen in the available data with qualitative research to understand what lies behind the changes (e.g., is it RCRP or could there be other factors behind any observed decreases or increases in volumes?).