Johannesburg Child Welfare (JCW) has launched Phase 1 of a pioneering digital case management system. The not-for-profit organisation is celebrating its 115th anniversary this year and it has marked the occasion by setting a new standard in child protection and social services.
The innovative move aims to alleviate the challenges of manual case management, which have often hampered JCW’s capacity to provide timely and effective support to vulnerable children and their families.
For decades, JCW has supported children needing safety and stability, relying on manually recorded case files to track critical information. As the caseloads grew, so did the complexities of managing information accurately and efficiently. Case notes, home assessments, and court updates – all essential for decision-making – often need to be meticulously documented and shared across departments. In a manual system, this meant mountains of paperwork, time-consuming data transfers, and the constant risk of missed updates or delayed responses. All of which could impact a child waiting for protection or placement in a safe environment.
Abubakr Hattas, CEO of JCW says, “one of the biggest challenges with the work that we do in ensuring child safety and protection often hinges on effective communication and prompt prioritisation of cases. In many instances, when a telephone or e-mail notification is received about a vulnerable child, if it’s not appropriately addressed, it can lead to delays in ensuring the safety of the child, and result in many children remaining in unsafe environments, medical institutions, or police stations due, to delays in assessing a case.”
With the integration of Kaseya’s BMS ticketing software, JCW can now streamline workflows to offer a faster, more reliable service to children and families. Upon system enrolment, caregivers and clients will receive an immediate acknowledgment of their case, and a unique ticket number to track each step. For JCW’s beneficiaries — often children who have already faced hardships like abandonment, abuse, or neglect — this system provides an efficient way to manage and monitor the journey to placing vulnerable children in safety more promptly.
The Kaseya’s BMS ticketing software addresses some of the most pressing challenges faced in manual case management, including delays in response times, maintaining complete case histories and cross-department coordination.
With manual systems, emergency cases can take longer to be routed, which is particularly crucial for children in unsafe situations. This new system categorises and prioritises cases immediately to ensure that high-priority cases, such as those requiring immediate intervention or placement, are flagged and attended to within 24 hours.
Before implementing the Kaseya BMS ticketing software, the intake department at JCW relied on a highly manual process. This manual approach extended across interdepartmental workflows involving intake, adoptions, foster care, the Department of Social Development, and law enforcement agencies—both internal and external. These outdated methods were prone to human error, delays and inefficiencies, often placing crucial child protection measures at risk.
Now, Kaseya BMS ticketing software has revolutionised these processes through digitisation and workflow automation. By streamlining case management and ensuring real-time communication between departments, we are seeing greater efficiencies in child protection services outcomes.
Once a case is logged, it is immediately prioritised and tracked throughout its lifecycle. From the initial identification of risk to securing the child’s placement in a safe environment, the system ensures that no critical steps are overlooked. It transitions cases seamlessly to the relevant statutory departments, until they are placed in temporary or permanent foster care.
Hattas explains that the JCW often encounters cases where a child’s history spans a number of years and multiple departments. With physical files, crucial updates could be overlooked or lost over time, leading to gaps in understanding the child’s needs, journey, and past experiences.
The system schedules and monitors follow-up activities, such as foster care visits and complies with legal and welfare obligations. It also provides robust case management for social workers, to help them balance caseloads, track effectiveness, and reduce errors that could impact a child’s well-being.
Hattas notes that a lot of the time cases involving children with disabilities or cases deemed as complex are the most affected by manual processes, as a result, many children are left in hospitals or inappropriate facilities, with no traceable plan for their care.
“This new digital system creates an auditable, timestamped history of each case, providing a clear and accurate timeline of every interaction, decision, and transfer between departments to the final phase where a child is adopted. This means we will also be able to keep track and record the child’s information throughout their lives,” Hattas says.
“Once the testing phase is complete, JCW plans to roll the system out across all its departments. Feedback from social workers will guide ongoing adjustments, ensuring the platform continues to meet the needs of children in JCW’s care. The goal is to build a case management system that not only supports efficient workflows for JCW but can also be used by other government departments,” notes Hattas.
INFO SUPPLIED.
