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APAD recommends Caspar
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Following resounding recommendations by peer teams via an online forum run by the Association of Public Authority Deputies (APAD), Trojan Consultants (www.trojanconsultants.com) welcomes Denbighshire County Council in Wales as a new customer of its highly-acclaimed Caspar Appointeeship & Deputyship case management solution.
Caspar is used by well over half of the local authorities in England and Wales as well as a rising number of private law firms who fulfil the role of Deputy for vulnerable clients.
In common with most local authorities, Denbighshire Council has seen its Deputyship case load soar. It has 160 clients on its books at the moment, and operates a waiting list – because demand exceeds the team’s capacity. Continuing to handle workloads the traditional way, using manual processes and a combination of office productivity tools, had become unsustainable.
“We are a small team of just 3 people, and we were managing all these cases primarily using spreadsheets and saving documents to folder,” says Siobhan Cuddeford, Team Manager for Client Services, within Denbighshire County Council’s Community Support Services department.
“We needed a system we could use for complete case management. When we started asking around, on the APAD forum, Caspar kept coming up as a good system to use. We then talked to other authorities who use it, who confirmed it was great.”
As roles were being reshuffled due to a member of the team retiring, Denbighshire seized the opportunity to instil new consistency to its client management and reporting process. “Caspar seems fantastic, and we can’t wait to get started with it,” says Cuddeford. “The diary function will remind us of tasks to complete, workflow will move everything along, and we’ll be able to get an instant snapshot of what is happening with each client.
“Moving away from manual processes to a bespoke case management system that has been designed specifically for the kind of work we do will be transformational. Being a Court of Protection Deputy is a specialist service, so it’s a great selling point that Caspar has been designed specifically for local authorities Deputies,” she notes. “Other solutions we looked at were really just ‘bolt-ons’ to other systems which we would have had to buy, and that’s not what we wanted.”
“With Caspar, we will have much more clarity around citizens’ income and capital, because it will all be there, visible in one place, and automated bank reconciliation will bring everything quickly into line,” she adds “It’s the whole package, really.