Important Concepts

Client Status

A client engagement goes through a certain set of stages that may vary from agency to agency but in general terms the engagement starts in an Initial Status. An example of an initial status might be Waitlist.

At some point, which could be immediately or after some time, the client engagement will be activated passing on to an active status. During the active phase all the main interactions with the agency occur and case notes are recorded, forms filled in and so on.

Finally when the client engagement comes to an end the client is exited with the status changing to one of the final statuses such as exited or failed to engage.

This workflow is an integral part of Paua with statistics and reporting often being based on active clients or clients activated in a certain period.

Once a client is in the Exited state they can go through one optional further process if required where they are Signed Off by a user who has been granted the privilege to sign off clients this is often a supervisor/team leader. This does not change the status, it is simply a check to show that a supervisor has authorised the exiting of the client.

These statuses and the corresponding dates are used when generating stats breakdowns by Waitlist Time, Case Duration, Entry to Exit Time etc.

It is possible to configure the names of these statuses to suit your agency but it is essential to have at least one status of each type Initial, Active and Final.

Warning

There is a feature available to Paua users with high privileges that enable you to Rollback a client status. For example a client status of Exited may be changed to Active and an Active status may be rolled back to Waitlist and so on.

This feature is intended purely as a way of fixing up mistakes such as when a client is exited in error and is not intended to reactivate a client who returns to the agency after a long break for example. In this case a new client engagement should be created for the person otherwise the fact that there has been a gap in the person’s interaction with the agency will be lost.

Client vs Person

The terms client and client engagement are often used interchangeably. In Paua it possible that a Person may have several associated Client Records Paua refers to the client records as Client Engagements in an attempt to illustrate that each Client record is the record of one engagement with the agency and it is possible for several engagements to be for the same person

When creating client engagements in Paua there is a facility to create a new client from an existing person where the person is already recorded in Paua. This means that the persons demographic details will not need to be re-entered. Alternatively a client engagement can be created with a new person where the person is new to the agency and the person’s demographic details will have to be entered in Paua.

Programmes

Programmes are the different services that your agency offer. Examples may be: Counselling, Family Support, Parenting and so on.

These Programmes are set up by you when your Paua installation is first created. New programmes can be entered at any time and old programmes can be inactivated if they are no longer part of the services that you offer.

One important feature of programmes is that one client engagement has one and only one programme. This means that if a person wants to avail themselves of more than one of your services then you need to create several client engagements for the same person but with a different programme for each.

Note

Some agencies use the word Service and some use the word Programme. It does not really matter so long as you understand that Paua uses the term Programme and this is a mandatory entry for all client engagements.

Warning

There is a facility in Paua called Transfers whereby you can move a client from one programme to another. In the same way as re-activating clients, it is not recommended to transfer clients between programmes unless they have been put in the wrong programme by mistake.

If a client is transferred then there is no record of the previous programme as far as reporting is concerned and so that information is effectively lost. In the same way as recommended in the client status section above, it is recommended that if a client changes programme, they should be exited from the first programme and a new client engagement created for the person in the new programme.