Innovative projects get Council’s seal of approval
Five exciting new innovation projects were agreed at Cabinet this week which will bring about real improvements in the way the Council delivers services, as well as helping to make financial savings.
The project proposals are part of the East Ayrshire Innovation Fund which was established to support services in taking forward projects that aim to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and accessibility of council services. As well as delivering tangible service improvements, some of the innovative projects will also create financial savings that are then repaid to the fund at the conclusion of each project.
The first project is an education-led initiative that provides a collaborative approach to reading support for the benefit of young people, other learners and the wider community.
A new online literacy resource will see all schools, Early Childhood Centres, support workers and Lifeskills and Inclusion Team service users benefitting from a growing online library of over 1700 texts which are enhanced with illustrations, music, animation and video to help learners fully engage with what they’re reading in any language. The texts can also be tailored to support readers who are dyslexic or visually impaired.
The project aims to help reduce the poverty-related attainment gap in reading, writing, listening and talking; reduce wastage in relation to ongoing book costs and replacements; and potentially significantly reduce expenses in terms of having to print and distribute physical books, workbooks and supplementary resources. Funding for the Collaborative Approach to Reading Support will be met by the Council’s Finance and ICT section.
The second project to be approved involves the expansion of the use of technology within health and social care to support people through early interventions and to provide meaningful, cost-effective ways for people to manage their own health and wellbeing.
Over the last five years, good progress has been made to achieve benefits through the use of digital technologies, but this will now be expanded further to consider technology widely available to the whole population and cutting-edge technology applied to care and support. This will be identified, tested and adopted at scale where benefits are shown.
Similarly, the use of digital technology, and more specifically AI, will help to make real improvements within the Care at Home Staff Management System. This innovative project will provide a fit-for- purpose monitoring, scheduling and digital management system, which will improve service quality and free up face-to-face time for caring activities.
It will enable a move away from mainly paper-based service delivery to a system where there is real-time access to updated service user information. The newer digital systems will also introduce dynamic scheduling, which involves using AI to automatically assign visits based on certain parameters and availability. AI-powered capacity checkers will also allow almost immediate calculation of whether there is current and future capacity to accommodate new requests for care services, a process that is completely manual at the moment and extremely time-consuming.
Within schools, a new, innovative project will be introduced to replace the current cashless catering system which will make it much more efficient.
The new system will introduce easier and more flexible meal pre-ordering options, including pre-ordering through an app for Secondary Schools. It will also feature improved reporting functionality that will help to create a better understanding of need and demand for meals so that the service can run as efficiently and effectively as possible with minimum wastage.
The final project to be approved involves purchasing two robotic cleaners which would be trialled at Barony Campus and William McIlvanney Campus.
A significant amount of staff time is currently spent cleaning large, mainly empty floor spaces, such as sport, dining, and assembly halls. This is a time-consuming, repetitive task which a robotic cleaner could deal with more quickly, allowing cleaners to focus on spot cleaning, disinfecting high-touch points and other areas that a machine is not able to reach effectively.
Councillor Douglas Reid, Leader of the Council, said: “These innovative projects all have huge potential to bring about real service improvements as well as allowing us to reinvest in continuous innovation over the coming years. This is something that is particularly important given the difficult financial position that the Council is currently facing.
“The increased use of digital technology, smart supports and AI will literally help to improve people’s quality of life, while we expect to see other positive outcomes such as the roll-out of early intervention and prevention projects and the development of more collaborative partnerships.
“We will obviously be closely monitoring these projects and evaluating their effectiveness, and a large part of this will involve gathering feedback from employees and service users to understand the benefits that these five exciting projects will no doubt provide.”
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