Housing triage improvement project

We found that the triage of enquiries to the housing team was having a major impact on homelessness prevention and other parts of the housing service that we provide.

We found out that triage could create problems for decision making in housing cases. At the same time, our approach to decision making affected how triage worked. All these issues together caused problems for us in helping people with their housing needs, later in the process.

Below is a summary of the changes and improvements. Our final project report describes our full findings, improvements, outcomes, and reflections.

The changes we made

We tried four experiments over six-weeks to try to improve the service we provide:

• Including housing officer support in first line triage
• Having threatened with homelessness checklists
• Having a triage form for our customer services team
• Changes to our report a rough sleeper form

We monitored the impact of these experiments through:

• The accuracy of triage outcomes for cases
• The ratio of the number of customer contacts to cases

Following these experiments, we made these changes:

• Introduced a new version of the homelessness checklist developed by our housing and customer services teams
• Introduced a new triage form for customer services
• Changed the methods of contact promoted by the service online
• Included new triage procedures and an agreement to work with customer services to improve these over time
• Mitigations and temporary monitoring for customer groups identified as potentially at risk of negative impacts from the changes
• Training and support for all the above

Measuring how much the changes helped

We agreed two measures and targets to help assess how well these changes worked:

• Reducing the amount of phone contact that was passed on by our customer services team to our housing team to 20%. This would be a good indicator that demand is being resolved at the first point of contact
• Have an accuracy rate of 90% when our teams used the new triage tool for customers

The 20% target for reducing the phone contact being passed on was not achieved. The result moved varied between 37% and 43%. We were hoping for a reduction that stayed around 20%. There were, however, positives from these figures. It led to an increase in signposting and more demand handled by our forms.

We achieved the 90% triage accuracy figure. The feeling in the team was that their changes have led to improvement. These improvements are reducing pressure and reducing feelings of lost time on non-productive tasks.

Our measure of demand/contact versus cases shows a declining trend in the ratio of calls to cases. It fell from around two cases created for every 10 calls, to one case per 10 calls for the past year.