Open Referral UK and what it looks like for our communities
Open Referral UK (ORUK) is featured in a video interview with Technical and Standards Advisor, Mike Thacker, and Linda O’Halloran, Senior Partner at TPXimpact. It’s a useful watch for anyone working in or around a council, even if you’ve never heard the term ‘data standard’ before. Mentioned in the video is a working ORUK example: Community Action Network’s Access to Community Support & Services (ACSS) project,
The Starting Point: One Standard, Consistently Applied
“Local authorities have a huge responsibility to deliver hundreds of services, and many people across the sector see opportunities to do things more effectively, solve common problems once and join services up better. However, these projects can be very difficult to scale across the sector.” – Linda O’Halloran, Senior Partner at TPXimpact
Mike explains that Open Referral UK is: “a standard for sharing open data that describes services across different local government departments and parts of central government,” covering everything from homelessness support to the services health professionals refer people to through social prescribing. “The objective of Open Referral UK is to gather the data relating to each service once, to a high standard, rather than having lower-quality data gathered in multiple places and trusted by nobody.”
This was the starting point for Community Action Network’s ACSS project. Funded by NHS Dorset, we built one shared dataset covering mental health services, family support, practical help and wellbeing activities, all structured to the ORUK standard.
What this means for residents
Imagine a jobs adviser with their own spreadsheet of services, separate from the lists held by local government and health. If the data is brought together, that person has access to a much wider range of services. For example, someone experiencing loneliness in retirement might be pointed towards a choir rather than a dedicated ‘loneliness service’.
That’s what ACSS’s dataset now does through CAN’s Service Finder, a free tool already used by over 1,000 frontline staff across health, council and voluntary organisations. Because the underlying data follows ORUK’s standard, Service Finder can be searched by topic, location and time of day, with results kept current through regular quality assurance checks. Update the dataset once, and every connected tool updates automatically, with a public-facing version, Access Wellbeing, on the way to extend that reach to the public directly.
“Standards give organisations the freedom to choose systems that perform the functions they need, while still allowing those systems to connect. That means they are not tied to one supplier or buying a single black-box system that does everything and considers itself to own the data”. – Mike Thacker
For example, if a council re-procures a service, they do not have to start from scratch but can move their data from one system to another, and because the dataset is published in an open, ORUK-compliant format rather than tied to one platform, it’s able to power multiple tools without the data needing to be rebuilt or re-licensed each time.
ORUK for you
Dorset is one of two counties testing this at scale, alongside Greater Manchester. “The purpose is not simply to implement isolated instances in separate councils. It is to implement the standard across groups of councils and associated public, private and voluntary sector bodies, so that we can properly assess the value of transferring and sharing data between them,” said Mike.
Be part of the change as ACSS builds the shared, assured, standardised dataset, and puts it to work for you through Service Finder.
Watch the Interview via Open Referral UK’s latest newsletter, and see the data standard at work through CAN’s ACSS project.
