Capita’s software services business has been awarded the ‘connected/mobility solution of the year’ title at the European IT & Software Excellence 2017 awards for how it has helped Liverpool YMCA to tackle homelessness and access to support services in the city.
Based on Capita’s Advantage Impact solutions, Liverpool YMCA’s ‘MainStay’ project was developed with the aim of providing improved access to short-term housing through more than 50 partner agencies and local authorities working together to share information.
Capita said that Advantage Impact is designed for organisations to use with service users, referral agencies and services for various functions such as assessing, referring, matching to services based on needs, risk, priority, and placing or signposting users.
MainStay has since evolved to be a Merseyside-wide project, improving access to all support services through a single-assessment that matches vulnerable people to available services and enables progress and outcomes to be monitored online.
The success of the MainStay project means that 66 per cent of applicants are now placed in accommodation within a week and one in four within 24 hours.
David Pugh, MainStay manager, Liverpool YMCA, said, “We wanted to revolutionise our referrals service for homelessness and we knew that an IT system that all partner agencies could access would help us achieve just that.
“Ultimately, we are preventing as many people as possible from sleeping rough and the matching used in the system means that people are accessing the right service for their needs straight away”
