Monmouthshire Housing and Social Services Case Study

For the last 6 years Monmouthshire Social and Housing Services have used Scancapture to send out, process and provide results from data captured from over 3,000 service users. Each month since the projects inception in October 2003, Scancapture have delivered 12,000 questionnaires for completion by new and regular users of the Councils Housing and Social Services and also Childrens Services to obtain their views on the quality of service provided. Completed questionnaires are sent directly back to Scancapture in pre-paid envelopes.

Scancapture treat all sensitive and personal information in the strictest of confidence and work with the Council to make sure they get the best out of conducting all of their questionnaires.

The Technology; Combining Accuracy and Speed
Scancapture use a combination of high speed document scanners with optical doubles detection to prevent any double feeds and sophisticated intelligent character recognition (ICR) software to automatically "read" the tick boxes, numbers, letters and open ended comments written on the questionnaire. Any questionable or incorrectly completed papers are manually checked on screen by an operator. As a large part of this project is automated by using technology, the whole process takes around one tenth of the time it would take for a manual operator to key the data into a computer database.

What Our Client Says About Us
In Monmouthshire we have an ambitious aim to ask each community care service user, by questionnaire, their views about the services they receive. The administration of the questionnaires, however, was becoming too great for our in-house resources. Using Scancapture enables us to continue to send out the questionnaires regularly and will also improve analysis of the information they offer in a cost effective way.

Notes to editors
Monmouthshire County Council Monmouthshire County Council is the governing body for the Monmouthshire principal area one of the unitary authorities of Wales.

Monmouthshire Housing and Social Services The questionnaires conducted by Scancapture span the Councils requirements for Adult Abuse, Blue Parking Badges, Care Home Services, Children with Disabilities, Health Challenge Monmouthshire, Services for people with Mental Health problems, Benefits Advice, Care Home charges, Care Homes, Community Care charges, Services for people with a learning disability, Social Services in an
Emergency.