Contact Notes in Curam (CPIN)

From a Case Supervisor:

I am writing to ask that you continue to inquire with IBM about needed changes to the case notes. When IBM came to Windsor for the day, I spoke in detail to the worker who shadowed me about the concerns I had with the current layout for contact notes. It is imperative, for the safety of children, that the notes become more accessible and fluent. I have the following concerns:

• History is not being found in a timely fashion or exhaustively. The need to click in and out of contact notes is time consuming, confusing and tedious. Sometimes there are hundreds of contact notes to go through clicking back and forth.
• No matter how clear or concise the “50 First Characters”, they could never include all pertinent information in the “50 First”. Some contact notes are written accounts of long conversations/home visits. They amount of information imbedded in the case note is not reflected in the “50 First”. This could include Nation information, information on on-going or historic safety concerns, information that is needed for the safety of children or who said what and when. There could be many very relevant topics in one contact note and they all cannot be capture in the “50 First”.
• You are only able to search key words “control F” on the current contact note. If you are looking for specific information imbedded in the contact notes (ie. the name of a perpetrator to FN status discussions), you have to go into each contact note. There are 100s of contact notes and/or several pages of extensive contact notes to search through – all individually clicked in and out of.
• The time it now takes to do recordings and/or legal paperwork has increased tenfold due to the tedious and time consuming way that case notes are “boxed” individually. This also affects where and how evidence is found in contact notes. If the author is the one completing the notes, it may be less time consuming however if the file is being covered, each and every contact note has to open and closed and searched for evidence.
• Information is segregated in other openings or files. A “from all occurrences” option that pulls all the case notes together in a fluent story, would help with finding essential information for safety planning for children.

I would highly recommend that the flow of the contact notes is changed. All contact notes, from all relative occurrences, should be available with one or two clicks, not several clicks per contact note. This is imperative for the safety of children, the creditability of evidence for court and recordings/meeting standards.