Social Work Informatics USES, Merits Research Paper

The creation of timely and well-designed outputs leads to further information recording, correcting and completing previous recordings. This builds into a "virtuous circle (Gatehouse et al.)."

Social workers rendering children's services should analyze their own work, compare it with others and contribute their data for evaluation (Gatehouse et al., 2004). They need output tools in order to do this. The critical outputs for improving child protection services are, in most cases, the outputs required from day-to-day operations, administration and management at the case, team and service levels. These outputs include built-in System alerts, notifications and exception reports. System alerts provide advanced warnings of required actions and service delivery mistakes or failures. Notifications are made to improvement communication between teams, departments and agencies. And exception reports identify, note or follow up cases of individual children whose needs have not been met. Findings of this study suggest that electronic information systems, such as the Integrated Children's System, must provide a range of capabilities to their users in order to yield useful outputs (Gatehouse et al.).

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