EFFICIENCY
The Government has launched a service that makes it far easier for people to inform the relevant authorities about births and deaths in the families – and it could affect how NHS managers do their job. Jonathan Stampton of the Department for Work and Pensions explains more.
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‘Tell Us Once’ service that helps peo- ple let government and their local authority know about a death or a birth is being made available across most of the country over the next few months.
The Tell Us Once service makes it easier for people to deal with government at a time when they need the most support. This is particularly true after bereavement when people are often feeling upset and over- whelmed.
The Tell Us Once team did lots of research into what sort of service people wanted when they had to report a birth or death and designed it around their needs. They also worked with CRUSE, the bereavement charity, to provide training so that frontline staff could deal sensitively with people who had lost a loved one.
Without a Tell Us Once service, relatives or friends dealing with the estate may face lots of bureaucracy and are usually over- whelmed just at the time they least want to deal with government.
Families find they have to give the same in- formation many times to government ser- vices and the information is often required to be produced in different ways.
This often meant purchasing additional death certificates and making numerous phone calls or writing letters. Research car- ried out showed that in some cases people had to contact government up to 44 times when reporting a death.
So when notifying a death, bereaved people may have to face dealing with forms, call centres or visits to government offices.
Tell Us Once can reduce the average num- ber of these contacts by seven. Less time is wasted providing the same information over and over again – Tell Us Once takes the information just once and uses it many times on behalf of the customer with their permission.
Local authorities deliver a face-to-face service and the Department for Work and Pensions provides a telephony service. Tell
Us Once is keen to be located where people who need its services go, so has already de- veloped partnerships with hospitals. An ex- ample of this is Guy’s & St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust who offer a Tell Us Once service on site as part of its bereavement services. Customers are able to register a death and get support in one place.
As one Tell Us Once bereavement cus- tomer said: “It was so terrible when I lost my daughter, I couldn’t even begin to think straight. The bereavement officer sat me down and went through everything; he was so sympathetic and helpful.
“It was all done during the one interview. I just hugged him. I couldn’t have done it on my own, I just couldn’t have.”
People will be offered the Tell Us Once ser- vice when they register a death or birth if it is available in their area.
FOR MORE INFORMATION Sites offering the service are listed at:
www.direct.gov.uk/death-tellusonce
national health executive Sep/Oct 11 | 31
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