Get to know Get Help Glasgow
The Glasgow Alliance to End Homelessness launched our Get Help Glasgow campaign in December to raise awareness of where people can access further information and further support if they, or someone they’re concerned about are rough sleeping or at risk of homelessness.
Get Help Glasgow is powered by ALISS (A Local Information System for Scotland), which can signpost you to a wealth of community support from mental health, money advice, foodbanks, or local activities to support wellbeing. In the blog below, ALISS’s Cameron Macfarlane shares more about how ALISS has been used to connect people to the support and activities in their community that can keep them well, safe and healthy.
ALISS (A Local Information System for Scotland) is a national digital system funded by the Scottish Government and managed by The Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland (the ALLIANCE). At it’s heart, ALISS is about working together to find and share information to connect with community assets, services and other resources that help people to live well. From the outset, ALISS has been co-produced with people who are disabled, living with long term conditions, and/or providing unpaid care, as well as professionals working in health and social care, digital technology, and data. The original development of ALISS was based on what people identified as being important for keeping them well, the barriers they faced, and what was needed to overcome these.
People said that a wide range of resources were important for their health and wellbeing. This included formal services providing support in relation to specific conditions or issues, but also the wide range of informal community groups and associations which offer opportunities to improve and maintain wider aspects of wellbeing such as social connections, physical activity and access to nature. However, people also said that it’s often difficult to find out what’s available. On some occasions this was due to a lack of information altogether but at other times because the information that does exist is out of date and can be scattered across a range of different places, making it hard to know where to look, especially if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for.
To address these challenges, people said they needed ‘one list’ where they could find all of the different things that can help to keep them well – but because different people will inevitably want or need to go to different places to get information, this same list needs to be available wherever they choose to go, whether that’s searching online themselves or being signposted by others. People also agreed that to help gather and keep the information on this list up to date, professionals and communities need to work together to share both the knowledge and effort.
As a digital system, ALISS continues to develop, evolve and improve on a continual basis but remains underpinned by it’s original aims and purpose. The ALISS Programme continues to rely and operate fundamentally on the principle of co-production both in terms of technical development as well as the contribution, management and provision of information and ALISS is still very much framed around the question of ‘What Keeps You Well?’. Essentially, ALISS works best when more people are involved and working together and the ALISS team work in partnership with communities and organisations across the country to map and share this information as widely as possible to make it more findable for people searching for support.
There are lots of ways that you can get involved too. If you’re an individual professional or citizen you can become an ALISS Editor to contribute and update information about supports and services you’re in contact with or aware of. If you’re part of an organisation you can claim and manage your own information to ensure it stays accurate and up to date, and/or you can display information from ALISS through your own directories or systems. You can start today by visiting www.aliss.org and the ALISS team would love to hear from you as well so please get in touch by emailing hello@aliss.org or phoning 0141 404 0239 if you’d like to chat or find out more.