About FAME
The adoption of multi-agency working has been driven by the Government’s legislative programme since it came to power in 1997. Recent developments, including the ODPM Social Exclusion Unit report and the Cabinet office Transforming E-government document, have underlined the importance of developing partnership working in the contexts of social inclusion and shared services. The last Children Act (2004) also places considerable emphasis on multi-agency working placing “a new duty on agencies to co-operate among themselves and with other local partners”, requiring Local Authorities to take the lead, and announcing “an integrated inspection framework to assess how well services work together”. FAME provides Local Authorities and their partners in both the public and voluntary, community sectors with the tools they can use to begin to implement this partnership based multi-agency working.
FAME provides:
- A nationally applicable, vendor-independent, framework toolkit (including a regional demonstrator) which is;
- Adaptable and scalable at the regional and sub-regional level allowing it to be applied to the full range of service situations in multi-agency working (multi-service, multi-agency and multi-authority) and;
- Supports the exploitation of existing and emerging technologies to provide efficient and effective multi-agency working (in an approach which is sustainable and incremental)
A typical example of this sort of challenge in a local government context is meeting the needs of a young carer. A response to such a demand, not only needs to deliver a co-ordinated assessment and service package to the young person, but also needs meet the requirements for the people they are caring for. Challenges such as these require a partnership working model which goes beyond the limitations of a single service multi-agency approach to an approach which provides the potential for co-ordinated responses which can be multi-service, multi-agency and multi-authority.
FAME is governed by a partnership based in the North East of England and includes the regional e-government partnership North East Connect, the Regional Centre for Excellence (NECE), Newcastle University (academic partner) and Newcastle City Council (accountable body). We are using the FAME toolkit in a range of emerging regional contexts (including information sharing around Every Child Matters) to establish a sustainable multi-agency approach to meeting the challenge of transformation in the delivery of services. We are working with regional bodies, government agencies, national initiatives (such as Government Connect) the voluntary and community sector and the supplier sector to build more clarity about the way forward in terms of the future of multi-agency service delivery. There is a widely understood need for capacity building in this area and we will be delivering CPD courses from mid 2007.
FAME Phase 3 applied the lessons learned in two contexts. These were Single Non-Emergency Number (SNEN)/101 Partnership and Every Child Matters. The project partnership included North East Connects (the regional e-government partnership), the Regional Centre for Excellence for the NE (NECE), Newcastle University (Social and Business Informatics group) and Newcastle City Council (as the accountable body).
Previous phases of FAME developed approaches to multi-agency working in the context of single service environments. This occurred in the areas of Children with Disabilities, Child Protection, Integrated Mental Health Records, Information Sharing and Assessment (ISA), Housing & Benefits and Promoting the Independence of Vulnerable Older People (Single Assessment Process). This work provided valuable learning and insight into the challenges of multi-agency working which informed the development of the versions of the toolkit. The products of this work and associated evaluation report are available in the archive section.
FAME is applying the lessons learned in the North East of England in two contexts. These are Single Non-Emergency Number (SNEN) and Every Child Matters. The project partnership includes North East Connects (the regional e-government partnership), the Regional Centre for Excellence for the NE (NECE), Newcastle University (Centre for Social and Business Informatics) and Newcastle City Council (as the accountable body).
Previous phases of FAME developed approaches to multi-agency working in the context of single service environments. This occurred in the areas of Children with Disabilities, Child Protection, Integrated Mental Health Records, Information Sharing and Assessment (ISA), Housing & Benefits and Promoting the Independence of Vulnerable Older People (Single Assessment Process). This work provided valuable learning and insight into the challenges of multi-agency working which informed the development of the versions of the toolkit. The products of this work and associated evaluation report are available in the archive section.
