AM2 for the in-house team ?
London Borough of Bexley have used AM2 for a year or more, firstly trialing the Retail Enforcement Pilot, subsequently extending, through choice, the scope of REP to include Licensing and Smokefree (REP originally included elements of food safety, trading standards, health & safety and fire safety). Bexley are now piloting a full scale "food safety" template, whilst also looking to develop their own "trading standards' template for piloting shortly. We should congratulate the London Borough of Bexley for their recent Beacon Award, the LBRO sponsored "Cutting red tape" Award.
Working with a number of Private Sector Housing experts, we have developed a template specifically to accommodate "HMO Licensing Compliance", for which we are now looking to identify a number of partner authorities prepared to work with us in piloting these new templates to tweak, to evaluate the efficiency and other benefits of it's use. The pilot authorites will also assist in developing other 'house condition' type templates, whether for Decent Homes, HHSRS, Immigration Inspections, Rent Deposit Schemes or House Condition Surveys.
The purpose is to build a 'bank' of generic templates covering every aspect of regulatory inspection and audit .. templates designed and tested by the practitioners themselves, made available for use with AM2 by all authorities on a 'no cost' basis. Truly the spirit of 'share-ware'.
Is AM2 complicated ? No, in terms of training the staff to use the system, it will involve: normal PDA training, then specific training in the use of the templates. We would prefer to train a 'super user' within the client, who in turn will train and support the individual users. This 'super user' will not need to be an IT expert, shall we say an IT enthusiast who is also a practitioner would be ideal. We provide support and training as part of the initial set-up and offer a 9am 'til 5pm, Monday to Friday help desk for all super-users.
Will everybody be able to make the transition to using PDA's for inspection ? Probably not. Some people just have a complete aversion to change. We've heard arguments that it de-skills the officer - we prefer to think that used in routine inspections it will free up time to enable to focus on the so called 'bad boys'... it will also produce a more comprehensive and more consistent inspection. Using PDA's is an important change ... PDA's in 2009 is a rather different issue to the attempts that were made a few years ago (Have you got a box of un-used PDA's sitting in the corner of the office ? remnants of some failed effort in the past).
james & associates have created a particularly low cost entry option. In conjunction with our partner Kairos Systems we are able to offer a monthly rental system of payment, per user, to include hardware, software, training and support, with no up-front licensing or recurring fees. No capital requirment at all.
Environmental Impact
- Reduced paper/postage and printing costs due to increase in the use of electronic reports.
- Reduced co2 emissions due to more efficient travelling and a reduction in office visits.
- No requirement to store paper reports. All reports are available on-line and can be accessed anywhere via the internet.