Supporting people to complete public health actions
Public health advice often depends on people being able to take practical actions: attend an appointment, isolate safely, obtain medicines or arrange transport. An individual may understand what is needed but face a barrier that makes completing a task difficult.
Sentinel's proposed Task Barriers feature would allow a public health worker to record a barrier against a specific task, identify relevant support services, and coordinate practical assistance. Barriers describe circumstances affecting the individual, rather than a problem with staffing, system configuration or the public health unit's workflow.
How it could work
- Identify a barrier. During an interview or survey, a person reports a practical difficulty with a specific task, for example attending a testing appointment because transport is unavailable.
- Record it against the task. The worker records the barrier, its description and any relevant follow-up. It is attached directly to the task instance, without requiring a Task Template relationship.
- Find appropriate support. Sentinel identifies organisations and services associated with the barrier type. A worker can review the options and determine whether a referral is appropriate.
- Request explicit consent. A dedicated questionnaire in the survey asks for consent to share the relevant information with the service. The question must be answered affirmatively before any referral automation can proceed.
- Make an electronic referral. Where a service has a configured messaging endpoint, Sentinel could prepare and send a referral containing only the necessary information, via an electronic messaging service, then retain the communication status and audit history.
- Track progress. Workers can follow up the barrier and the task, including if the service is unavailable, the message fails or the person withdraws consent.
Illustrative scenario
A contact is advised to attend a clinical assessment but reports having no transport. The interviewer records transport unavailable as a barrier to the assessment task. Sentinel offers configured transport-assistance services. After a specific, recorded consent response, Sentinel sends an electronic referral to the selected provider. The task remains visible for follow-up, and the referral's delivery status can be reviewed.
Responsible automation
Referral automation must be expressly consented to through the survey questionnaire; an assumption, unanswered question or general consent flag is insufficient. Service matching and referral decisions should be reviewable, and only the minimum necessary details should be disclosed. Configured organisation/service relationships and electronic messaging integration are prerequisites. Descriptions can contain human-readable eligibility guidance without requiring a complex machine-readable rules engine in the initial implementation.
Planned implementation
The planned design includes task-level barrier records, barrier-to-organisation-service associations, identification of service messaging endpoints, electronic referral tracking, and a vwTaskBarrierReporting reporting view. These are proposed capabilities and are not available in the current release.
Read the technical feature specification on GitHub ↗
The specification link targets the intended location in Sentinel's repository and will become available when the Markdown document is published.