What Difference will Integrating Services Make?

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Moving staff into one site will provide one specialist centre where professionals and families can access advice, information and services. It will enable us to deliver joined up services for children and young people with disabilities through:

• Providing one central referral point.
• Having one common referral form so families do not have to repeat their information with every practitioner
• Co-ordinated appointments, so children can have a number of appointments one after the other, at the same site.
• Joint multi-agency assessments where appropriate - with all relevant practitioners involved.
• Integrated information sharing systems.

Note: Practitioners such as Physiotherapists, Educational Psychologists or Occupational Therapists who currently spend time in schools or community sites, will continue to do so. The difference will be that they will have one base to come back to to meet with families or colleagues from any service when required.

In addition, through the Early Support programme, the ISCWD has a number of key workers for children with complex needs aged 0-5. The keyworker provides a single point of contact for families - someone to help them with advice, support and coordination of services.  For more information about the keyworkers, please click here.

The ISCWD is also working on harmonising language across services in order to support effective joint working, and to provide consistent messages and avoid confusion when families talk to staff from different services.

Access to information

The ESCAN has supported and funded the development of this website with Mencap, to provide all possible information in one site for families and professionals about children with disabilities.  Work will soon be starting on web pages for children and young people with disabilities.