Blog posts about EnviroWorks

We are pleased to be launching our new environmental health reporting service: EnviroWorks. It is a private and secure environmental health reporting and case management system, designed for the unique needs of environmental health teams.

In a series of blogs, we’ll explore how we got to this point and look in detail at the service. Let’s get started.

Understanding the need

As with any good user-centred design process, let’s first take a look back at our core users and the needs that brought us to create EnviroWorks.

Environmental health teams at our local authorities play a critical role in improving public health and protecting the environment. They deal with air quality management, noise pollution, food safety inspections, and housing standard enforcement. These are key issues affecting our health: noise is one of the leading environmental risks for physical and mental health and well-being. Bad odours can cause nausea, headaches and irritability. Poor air quality is linked to cancer, stroke, asthma, and heart disease. 

And environmental risks don’t impact everyone equally: minority ethnic groups, low income households, and those with inadequate housing conditions are more likely to be exposed to environmental health issues, such as poor air quality or excessive noise.

Whilst playing such a vital role, environmental health teams in some local authorities are struggling with capacity. As of 1 October 2023, on average 13% of environmental health posts in local councils were vacant. But reports from citizens are not going anywhere. Over just a three month period, local councils in London and the South East received over 90,000 and 40,000 noise complaints respectively. And that’s just noise! 

It is within this context that we received requests from our local authority clients and their environmental health teams, who wanted support managing their case load and a more user-friendly frontend reporting system.

Starting with noise

In 2020, Hackney Council came to us wanting to make the process of submitting noise reports a smoother one for residents and for council staff.  We worked intensively with Hackney’s Environmental Health team on a Discovery and Alpha project to understand the challenges they were facing, and to launch a brand new minimum viable case management solution for them.

This solution helped the team gather and manage information; helped them make decisions with all the information they needed; exposed useful data patterns; facilitated  sharing of information with reporters and relevant internal teams; and allowed them to retain information for compliance purposes. We called it NoiseWorks.

Building on our existing services

NoiseWorks has now been running successfully for five years. During that time, we have been seeing a growing need among our local authority clients for a service that covers broader environmental health reporting. 

To address this need, we wanted to create something that (like all our services) is accessible and easy to use for citizens, whilst being flexible enough to accommodate the unique needs of each council. With a user-friendly interface, comprehensive case management system, and private and secure back-end, EnviroWorks helps the public sector better serve citizens. 

EnviroWorks is a step on from NoiseWorks, with additional reporting categories, the ability to provide supporting documentation (such as recordings), and some other additional features. 

In an upcoming blog, we’ll show the tool in more detail… watch this space!

In the meantime, if you are interested in EnviroWorks, drop us a message and we’ll get back to you.

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Image: Joshua Brown on Pexels