đź‘‹ Hello from National Support Network

General
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Hi everyone,

Cat from social enterprise National Support Network CIC here.

We curate and maintain SupportHub, an easy-to-use directory of national support services across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. We share this with organisations looking for new or easier ways to help customers, colleagues or communities in need. It offers:

• Scope, depth and diversity - Avoid patchy information and connect anyone to support regardless of their personal circumstances with an index of over 1000 problems across areas including health, housing, work, money, crime, family and relationships (and even pets!).

• Higher data quality - Our vetting processes, trained teams, technology and feedback loops are core to our Data Quality control framework. This safeguards users with all information carefully curated and continually updated

• Better usability - With a simple problem-based search and browse functionality we can help people discover support which may not otherwise be found. With filters users can narrow results to match their individual needs and preferences.

SupportHub has been carefully curated and developed over the past five years through award-winning work involving hundreds of people across the UK.

Data quality is at the heart of what we do. We take safeguarding very seriously and we evaluate and monitor services across our strict suitability criteria which includes aspects such as accreditation, authority and quality.

We’ve connected thousands of people in need and look forward to reaching more people through new projects and partnerships, such as those with Nominet, Big Issue and Young Scot.

Great to see Open Referral standards development progressing, great work Mike!

If anyone is interested in our work please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Many thanks,
Cat

Website: https://nsn.org.uk/
Contact: Cat Divers, info@nsn.org.uk

1 Like
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Good to hear from you Cat. I think you’re more interested in consuming data and I expect sources to increase if (as I expect) the Department For Education in England starts to encourage and use feeds. There’s also work to increase use in the voluntary sector. Of course we’d love you to publish the non-sensitive parts of your data according to the standard.

Is your “index of over 1000 problems” a published list (or formal taxonomy)? Ones used in local government include the LGA’s: Needs List, Personal Circumstances List, and Community Services List.

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Hi Mike, that’s fantastic, thank you.

Our taxonomy of life challenges is not public. From a quick scan our scope is much broader across topics mentioned above e.g. work, crime, relationships, pets and has more depth too e.g. mental health split down across diagnosed mental illnesses, emotional wellbeing, helping others with their mental health etc.

The taxonomy continues to change based on how the changes around us. For example, long covid, cost of living, Ukranian refugees etc.