Falkirk Council earns Partnership and Resilience awards for emergency planning

The Council came out top in two categories – the Partnership Award and the Resilience Award – both for the development and implementation of a vulnerable person’s database, which helps identify the most vulnerable residents during times of unexpected disruption or emergency situations.

In the past the council relied on sourcing and checking off paper lists and also faced personal information sharing restrictions.

The Council worked with NHS Forth Valley to overcome the legislative barriers and the database now allows the sharing of both NHS data and Falkirk Council’s social work data to be matched. The vulnerable person’s database also allows for near instant identification of individuals via electronic mapping.

Council Leader Cecil Meiklejohn said: “These awards are testament to the commitment of our resilience team and public sector partners to come up with an innovative system to keep our most vulnerable residents safe during an incident or emergency situation.

“The database is a quantum leap in terms of a robust and manageable mechanism to identify our residents who may require immediate assistance in response to an incident. The data is reliable, regularly updated, secure, user friendly and available for use 24-7.”

The database has been promoted as an example of best practice throughout Scotland and the Scottish Government has used it to develop a national system – and couldn’t have done it without the prior input and work from the Falkirk team and was launched in 2017.