Multi Agency Safeguarding Tracker (MAST) wins another award for tackling vulnerability through data sharing

The responsibility to safeguard vulnerable people lies with councils and a range of safeguarding partners. Too often vulnerability is identified too late. Limited data sharing between organisations makes it hard to identify people who need support before they hit a crisis. It’s also hard to see if they are already known to those in the wider safeguarding community.

Paul Withers, Data Protection Manager for Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council wanted to innovate the service and the process of data sharing.

The Police, social services, Fire & Rescue and the NHS all hold demographic data such as name, date of birth, gender, address, date of the incident (or start of social work process) and safeguarding contact name. 

Paul wanted to expand on what could happen if this information was actively shared (rather than being requested by partners), and made available 24/7 so that safeguarding professionals  could have a current, clear picture of the safeguarding landscape in relation to a person or address. 

The Multi Agency Safeguarding Tracker (MAST) was therefore designed to give professionals a greater view of partner interventions and enables staff to identify whether early intervention or further details and/or actions are needed. The result of this ultimately being to support decision making around case closures, speed up lateral checks, and reduce the number of No Further Actions coming back into the system, all through evidence based practice. 

MAST creates a data-driven digital approach enabling information from multiple safeguarding bodies to be easily and securely shared, matched and anonymised.

MAST gives social workers the information they need so that:

• The number of serious incidents involving children is reduced
• The number of safeguarding concerns involving adults is reduced
• Vulnerable people are protected from harm so that they do not need to enter the social care system

The project is one of three Social Care Digital Innovation Accelerator (SCDIA) 2020/21 projects and is run by Policy in Practice and CC2i for LGA, with match funding from NHS Digital.

So far MAST has achieved:

• Robust data governance agreements for safeguarding purposes developed and agreed by all partners
• Secure data transfer, data management, information security processes from all partners
• Automated data matching and subsequent anonymisation across all records
• Over 300,000 records have been successfully brought into the system with significant results
• Half of Walsall Council’s children’s social care records, and over a third of adult records match with police records alone
• Identified cases which had significantly escalated, with a massive impact on blue light services and the public purse, which were then progressed via a multi-agency, evidence-based approach
• Data matching results: 28 matches across 12 addresses over three months between the fire service and families known to Children’s services. At least two of these matches, one with multiple incidents at the same address, were not known to Children’s services, justifying the project alone.

In November 2022, MAST was awarded the Public Finance Award for Aligned Public Service Delivery.

The judges said: “an impressive story about the real-world benefits of sharing data to improve public service delivery.”