Take paper out of ‘paperwork’

Probation Service officers are reported to be so “bogged down by paperwork” that they spend up to 75% of their time ticking-boxes and processing forms, rather than supervising offenders.

The Justice Select Committee points out that it would not be acceptable in a school if teachers only spent 25% of their time teaching.

So why is the Probation Service wasting all this time?

The problem appears to be with the National Offender Management Service (NOMS). NOMS was set up with the good intention of balancing the needs of prisoners with the resources of the correctional services.

Implementing an ‘end-to-end management’ process for each offender, as specified by NOMS, so that an individuals’ progress is traceable from their first contact with the correctional services to full completion of the sentence, should have improved efficiency.

Instead, it has created piles of ‘paperwork’ which has actually made the process it was designed to improve worse! But this inefficiency is not confined to the Probation Service, since we hear that the Police are similarly bogged down and no doubt other services are suffering too.

With today’s technology the use of physical paper should be the exception as opposed to the rule

Look at how many electronic transactions and activities we perform today as consumers, with virtually no paper in sight – apart from the obligatory boarding card in some cases!

It is easy to capture information electronically at source

By removing the paper, or by converting it into electronic format, it can be more easily analysed and moved throughout the organisation. For the Probation Service, this saves officer time, freeing them up to focus more on what they should and want to be doing; working closely with released prisoners to re-establish them in the community.

The end-to-end management process set up to match prisoner needs with correctional resources is retained, but documents are now easy to find from the desktop and workflow can be added to automatically route the ‘paperwork’ throughout the organisation and to the correct person at every stage of the process.

Improving process flows so you can save time is what we do

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Want to know more?

Contact us enquiries@processflows.co.uk or 01962 835053.