Wowment Ltd

NHS Problem

There are over half a million young people in the UK being supported by social workers. However, the system is struggling. In February 2023 the government announced an ‘overhaul’ of children’s social care in response to 3 independent reviews which revealed the current system “struggling to meet the needs of children and families across England”. 

Social workers spend over 50% of their time performing “excessive record keeping” and only 20% of their time working directly with their beneficiaries. These pressures are causing recruitment and retention issues. 20% of social worker posts were left vacant and 17% left the profession in 2022. 

The Solution

Our innovation is to use technology and AI to address these issues head-on. We will further develop our existing technology platform to provide a record-keeping and monitoring system for social workers’ interactions. This monitoring system will integrate AI to assess and score the complex progression that each young service user is making over prolonged periods.

Through our platform, social workers will be able to make digital video calls, or sensitively monitor face-to-face meetings. AI will analyse the secure recordings of these meetings. Using sentiment and NLP analysis the young person’s emotional state will be measured to track progression.

Impact

It’s predicted that improving administrative tasks for social workers could unlock an additional 150,000 hours a week of social workers’ time. This would mean that thousands of young people needing support would gain access to it.

Not only will this provide automatic reporting, unlocking vast amounts of much-needed time for social workers, but it will also give a significantly clearer picture of the rate and depth of change being achieved by each individual across their ongoing interactions.

Armed with this data it will be possible to truly understand the impact of social worker’s vital interventions. It opens an opportunity to monitor, report, benchmark and improve best practices.