Summary
- 5 hours saved per day distributing medical paperwork
- 40% increase in bookings for death appointments online over booking via Hampshire’s contact centre.
Hampshire’s Challenge
Spanning 11 district, borough and city councils, Hampshire County Council stands as the 3rd largest shire council in the country. And notably, one of the busiest.
With around 1.4 million people calling Hampshire home, the local registration team span multiple offices to support residents throughout the region, helping them best support citizens at life’s big moments.
But in-between uniting couples through marriage or celebrating a new birth, Hampshire registrars also play a critical role in registering deaths and supporting the bereaved.
In 2023 alone, Agenda recorded over 12,000 death registration bookings within Hampshire. But with such a large population and a significant number of offices across their county, managing medical documentation ahead of appointments was a daily challenge.
For death registration appointments to go ahead, they require the receipt of either an MCCD and/or coroner documentation ahead of the booking.
The Solution
In 2022, Stopford worked with a handful of local authorities to design a way of verifying the receipt of matching documentation to a booking being made in real-time.
The result would see Restrictive List work using the following steps:
- Registrars would log the documentation they received into Agenda’s Restrictive List module.
- The online flow would be updated so that bookings with details matching available documentation would allow the customer to proceed to the next available appointments.
- Appointments that didn’t match the required criteria would either be prevented from continuing or be given a delay to prevent access to the next available appointments.
This would be replicated in admin too, allowing registrars to search for documents against bookings by criteria including name and date of event.
The records would be stored in a database, allowing for centralised management of MCCDs and coroner documents, creating one place for adding, searching and allocating records across their many offices.
The Impact
After having their deaths process active with Restrictive List for a few months, the Hampshire team reported back a significant time saving, bringing down the distribution of MCCD paperwork from 6 hours a day to just 1.
In that same period, online booking for death appointments had shown an increase from 20% to over 60% as a proportion of total bookings for that appointment type.
The Stopford solution offered the ability for Hampshire Registration to upload the MCCD which enabled customers to book their appointment knowing that we had received the relevant paperwork.
This has improved the customer journey and allow Hampshire registration to manage appointment availability more efficiently without creating additional costs to the service.
Bereaved customers are confident in the process and have a good experience which has resulted in positive feedback.
