Senior Data Analyst, Community Empowerment Services
The Community Justice (Scotland) Act 2016 will be a familiar starting point for partners in a Community Justice Annual Report. However, it is worth highlighting that under the Duty of Co-operation, the Act highlights “sharing information” specifically as the first area of co-operation across the partnership. Even as far back as 2011, the often-highlighted Christie Commission indicated “data-gathering” as an important part to improve services across the Public Sector to reduce duplication.
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For many years public services have been criticised for their silo data retention and service delivery. Data is collected on individuals the service interacts with, and no further connection is made; despite the potential for signposting beneficial public services or in many cases where other services have attended the same individual without a cohesive support.
With effective data sharing protocols across public serving agencies, services can be better connected to identify smaller problems before they become larger more difficult ones. Data sharing is only a small part of moving towards proactive preventative services delivery models, moving away from reactionary services.
Of course, in recent years with implementation of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – CLICK ON THE PICTURE LINK BELOW – sharing data is more proscribed and cumbersome. However, many of the themes of the GDPR are the same as those in the Data Protection Act of 1998, around protection of personal information. So why is it that Data Sharing hasn’t been more prevalent within public sector services?
Without a full understanding of the Act it is understandable for organisations to be hesitant, even if the intension of a project may be beneficial to an individual. By disseminating a better understanding of the legislation, it is my hope more data sharing processes can be developed across the Community Justice Partnership.
Any work using personal data is required to give an output option at point of induction. With a clear privacy statement any individual whose data will be collected, should have an understanding of the potential ways their data may be used and shared, with a clear option to be removed from the process should the programme not be a legal requirement of their participation.
Options are already available within the confines of GDPR before following the route of data sharing agreements. Synthetic data analysis, a process of removal of all private, identifiable or sensitive information and replaced by an alias or pseudonym. This leaves a false individual within the dataset which can be used to identify individual characteristics from the data set without identifying the individual. Or Pseudonymisation where a non-identifiable shared key may be used to identify an individual within a data set without the need to share private information.
Electronic record management is another difficulty. Often organisations have invested heavily in systems for a specific task in mind when it was implemented which lacks flexibility. However as can be exampled by the article Pathfinder to Housing Health and Benefits Partnership (PHHaB) – which demonstrates data is capable to be interpreted and found more useful than its original intention of collection – this can be overcome by working closely in partnership to find the solutions.
Community Justice Glasgow has many examples of Data Sharing, and in future we hope to progress and report on many more.
