Improvement of knowledge collaboration in Randers Family Centre
In 2018 Propublic was part of a collaboration with Randers Family Centre aimed at strengthening the quality of their documentation. The case shows how it is possible to work with systematic use of knowledge in daily practice, the importance of documentation tools in the professional work with problem identification, inference, and choice of intervention and how it is possible to design (site/task specific) documentation in order to support a motivating knowledge collaboration around the execution of the core tasks
Better use of own documentation
The management in the case municipality had a notion that all the documentation they produced could be used for something more than just documentation and control. That it had to be possible to make use of the existing and available knowledge to a larger degree than had hitherto been the case, to prioritize and organize the efforts within the field. An idea which also reflected a wish to supplement the management platform with knowledge about the quality in the execution of the core task, rather than knowledge about framework conditions exclusively ((level of) expenditure, adherence to deadlines and legislative requirements etc.). The Management wanted to look further into how the existing knowledge was used. Initially in the shape of an examination of the existing documentation pathways between the area of authority and the executing part within the case municipality. Therefore, the management decided on a research-based examination of how knowledge, registrations and documentation of interventions were passed on within as well as between their family-related departments, and of why some professionals felt such a strong aversion towards certain documentation requirements and procedures for the collaboration around each intervention.
More and better professional management of the core task
The documentation systems that professionals are obliged to use contain explicit as well as implicit explanatory models and normative assumptions about who should be offered an intervention and why it is expected to work. The examination of documentation paths/pathways and knowledge collaboration prompted a future prioritizing of the fine-tuning of the documentation paths on the part of the case municipality, so that they could begin using all the knowledge that was already being collected about the cases in a way that made it easier for the leaders to prioritize, argue and steer the framework of the interventions, just as the professionals would get a better foundation for fine-tuning choice of intervention and treatment. Specifically, the examination of the knowledge collaboration lead to a decision to look deeper into how the documented knowledge could be used to gain an insight into their own practice.