Application Series 8 Application Series 8
During the Victorian era in UK many large mental asylums were built around the country to protect society from people judged to be mentally or morally unfit. The asylums were completely self-contained and located in remote areas. Until recently, these institutions provided a major source of care for the mentally ill.
'However, Government policy now favours care for the mentally ill in the community. This has led to a change in needs' Janet said. 'We need to ensure that these changes are implemented effectively, so RCCS provides monitoring and information systems which assess the quality of the new community care services'.
The day to day users of care systems have no computer skills 'and they shouldn't need these skills to be able to administer a continuing care system' Janet points out. 'We need to be able to interface with existing systems, rather than rewrite them all; produce a variety of standard and ad-hoc reports; ensure the confidentiality of data; and run across a number of operating systems'.
'SIR became an obvious choice for the development of such a system' Janet said. SIR's ability to provide access to other systems such as SPSS and DBase made it easy to interface with existing systems. SIR also provides a number of report modules to satisfy different needs. It supports 31 levels of security and is available on many platforms, such as PC/LAN and UNIX.
SIR/Easy and SQL provide user-friendly ad-hoc reporting facilities which minimise the amount of programming a user has to do. 'Finally SIR has a fourth generation language, PQL, which makes developing user interfaces easy' Janet said.
A Client is cared for by one or more Carers and details of these are recorded on individual CARER records. Every Carer must be regularly supervised to ensure adequate care is provided. So a SUPERVISION record is needed to record these details.
Meetings between the Client and Carer to identify social and health problems and recommend various therapies are recorded in PROVIDER CONTACT records.
Reviews of the Client's condition, conducted by Consultants and Carers, are recorded in REVIEW records.
Annual assessments of the mental and social well-being of the Client are recorded in the CPQ record.
'As we investigated the structure of the existing system so was designed the database to imitate it.' Janet explained 'The final database is complex in structure and does truly reflect the way the system works in reality. But each one of its records is connected either directly or indirectly to the Client.'
Fifteen predefined reports give management performance indicators of the quality of care being provided. Parameters required for these reports are generally selected by pick lists so that minimum training and data entry is required to use the system.
Interfaces to SPSS and DBase analysis systems were created as required in the original specifications.
'These things make a big difference to the Systems Manager and can mean the difference between a smoothly running system and a nightmare'. Janet explained
'SIR made it easy to design the RCCS system exactly as our client wanted' Janet commented. 'User menus systems; powerful utilities; and, PQL, certainly makes it easy for application developers.'
For further information about the RCCS system please contact:
Janet Dyson
Senior Consultant
Forvus
53 Clapham Common South
London SW4 9BX UK