Customer Overview

State of Tasmania's Safe at Home Program 

www.safeathome.tas.gov.au 

The State of Tasmania has a population of more than 500,000 people, served by 855 state government employees. Eliminating family violence is a top priority for the Tasmanian Government. 

Following a series of high-profile family violence deaths, the state recognised that it needed to improve coordination between government services to better identify and mitigate family violence issues, 

This resulted in the "Safe at Home" program. Safe at Home is a coordinated, whole-of-government action plan to respond to family violence. It brings together all government agencies to: 

• support families affected by violence 
• strengthen legal responses to family violence to hold perpetrators to account for their violent behaviours
• change the attitudes and behaviours that lead to family violence

The Challenge 

Initially the action plan was managed by a range of ad-hoc systems, spreadsheets, and manual, paper-driven processes. 

With the approach, it was difficult to identify relationships between incidents, perpetrators and victims, and to prioritise the most at-risk families. It was also difficult to provide the controls, auditing, and reporting that was required for such a broad program. 

The Solution

In 2008, ReadyTech and the state began working closely together to develop a case management solution based on Ready Case to better support the program from end-to-end. 

The state names its new platform the Safe at Home Information Management System (SIMS). ReadyTech configured SIMS to electronically import family violence and family argument reports from Police and justice systems. The system applies a sophisticated weighting and scoring algorithm to match incident reports, create cases, and identify the highest priority cases for action. 

In 2010, SIMS was upgraded to the latest version of Ready Case, providing greater flexibility, workflow capabilities and transparency. 

The Result 

Of the 855 state government employees, more than 300 now use the system. Participating agencies include the police, prosecutions, corrections, family violence counselling services, child safety, education, youth justice, and defendant health services.  

The state-wide program is organised regionally. Each region has weekly meetings where all agencies come together to review the cases, and plan actions from a whole-of-government perspective. They use SIMS to prioritise cases for the meetings, to record discussions, action plans, tasks and case outcomes. Business rules and workflows drive compliant case management processes from end-to-end. The system also manages all case-related documentation such as court orders and case plans. The management group has comprehensive, transparent and auditable reporting of all family violence issues state-wide. 

"SIMS underpins the whole Safe at Home program. It improves accountability for all users and provides the reporting we need. Importantly, it helps us to improve the relationship between all government services, so we can better deliver a coordinated response." 

Tasmanian Government

The program is now mature and well proven. With SIMS, the state now has a comprehensive, whole-of-government picture of family violence issues and responses. 

The lastest Safe at Home action plan identified that the program had: 

• Made 3,752 recommendations to better support the victims of family violence and hold perpetrators to account 
• Mapped 590 high-risk family violence incidents 
• Identified 5,235 at-risk children identified and made 3,256 notifications to schools to support students experiencing family violence
• Provided 102 women with safety upgrades to support them to remain in their home or home of their choice.