CHARMS has been developed in the UK and is hosted in the UK on a private cloud in datacentres provided by our partner, UKFast. UKFast are ISO27001 accredited and work closely with our team at SCN to offer complete security for our customers an their data. Data security is paramount and backups are only stored in the UK; our developers are all UK based and all our staff are enhanced DBS checked.
The fastest growing CHARMS community is children's residential. If you need a secure, online system to manage all the young people's case records look no further than CHARMS - it does all that you need. Care workers complete their logs quickly and easily; care home managers can see what is going on instantly; and now, young people looked after can keep their own recordings safe using the CHARMS Young People App.
The Education and Adoption Act 2016 placed a responsibility on local authority adoption services and voluntary adoption agencies to work together to establish Regional Adoption Agencies (RAAs) in England. CHARMS is the best system, we think, to deliver a complete, out of the box, ready to go case management system for RAAs. Already, as at July 2017, two RAAs in Greater Manchester and Cheshire (10 local authorities) are live with CHARMS and we are pleased that many more are looking at what CHARMS can offer. Of course, across all other jurisdictions in the UK and Ireland CHARMS helps to manage the whole adoption process for a number of agencies. In Scotland, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland CHARMS is part of the adoption community.
SCN's dedicated supported employment system, ASSET, and CHARMS have now been merged and CHARMS offers the adult care community a unique, ground-breaking system to manage service user records in any care setting. Lancashire CC Shared Lives Service has been a fantastic user of CHARMS for many years and through their commitment to using secure, online records management system and their collaboration with our team at SCN we now have a system which can be help to save time across all providers. Services include supported employment, outreach, semi independence, residential care, mental health services and many more.
Across the UK and Ireland some 250+ independent fostering providers and local authority fostering teams use CHARMS on a day to day basis to manage every aspect of the foster carer recruitment, training, assessment and approval process. Post approval, thousands of foster carers use CHARMS to record their daily logs and to communicate, securely, with their link worker. Young people looked after can also now login to CHARMS to keep their own "life story" and to share information with their carers and social workers. Panel members, assessors and all other stakeholders can login to CHARMS to access everything they need in the safest possible way.
CHARMS was born in 1996 when our Managing Director, Jim Moores, took on the challenge of creating, in Dataease, a unique system to manage case records which mimicked, as closely as possible the old paper files. Why create a complicated database system which forced care staff to feed information in, never to see it again (in some cases). With the paper file the worker could simply flick through and find the care plan or Form F or development plan... CHARMS is the paper file - but it's all digital, it is online, it is safe AND managers can run reports on everything and get information when they need it. From Dataease to Microsoft Access to ASP.NET; from the Greater Manchester Adoption and Fostering Consortium to almost 300 local, regional and national agencies - CHARMS has been through adolescence and is now a mature system relied upon by more than 20,000 individual users.