Access Social Care’s chatbot

Every day, millions of older and disabled people are suffering rather than getting the social care they need. This affects all of us - we will all need social care at some point. Most local authorities can’t meet the growing demand for care, none are confident they can meet their legal duties in the future. 

We all have a right to hold public bodies to account. But most of us cannot afford lawyers so rely on legal aid. The 91% drop in legal aid cases since 2010 means we have nowhere to turn. Without access to justice, our rights do not exist. The rule of law is broken.

Here at Access Social Care we want to improve access to justice, and provide information about the law to anyone who needs it, when they need it. Our solution is a legal information chatbot, available 24/7 and free to use. Our chatbot tells you about the law and helps you access further help.

You can access the chatbot by clicking the icon in the bottom right hand corner of your screen.

About the legal chatbot

The legal chatbot delivers legal information about community care and welfare benefits, to older or disabled people, their families, and carers. The chatbot is designed to take the user through their situation and identify a letter that they can send to help resolve the problem they face. The chatbot is free to use.

If you have not been able to find the help you need on the chatbot, you can find someone to speak to by searching for local advice services on the advicelocal website. Member organisations can contact Access Social Care here. 

The chatbot uses Rasa technology, which means that it learns from each chat and gets better at understanding questions and answering them over time. More information about Rasa can be found here. 

The chatbot covers the law in England

The chatbot provides legal information about social care law in England. When we talk about the law we mean the law in England. The chatbot should not be used to seek legal information for someone who lives outside England. However the chatbot also provides information about welfare benefits, which usually covers England and Wales. 

Easy to read and understand

The legal chatbot is designed to give legal information to older or disabled people, their families, and those providing care and support or information to older or disabled people. 

We want as many people as possible to be able to understand and uphold their rights. We are working to make the chatbot as easy to read and the information as straightforward to understand as we can. However, we recognise that the law is a complex system and some people will not be able to use the chatbot effectively themselves. Where needed, we hope that families and supporters will be able to use the chatbot to share the information with the person in need of care and support in a way that works for them. We will continue to work to make the chatbot accessible. 

Personal information

When you use the chatbot, we’ll ask for your first name and email address. We ask for this information so that we can send you a follow up email with a record of our conversation and then contact you one more time to suggest further actions that might help your situation. Please do not enter names, contact details, or any information that could identify anyone else, for example a family member or a person that you support. This type of information is called personal data. We do not have a way of getting consent to store these details from that person, and we do not need their information for the chatbot to work.

If you do enter personal information on our chatbot, it will be stored on the Rasa platform for up to 14 days. We will not share this information outside of Access Social Care and our technical partners, unless we have to by law. We will delete it after 14 days.

We use other information you provide in your chat to try to improve the lives of people who need care and support. One of the things the chatbot can do is to spot if lots of people are having the same problem in a particular area. We want to use this information to try to make sure that local authorities follow the law. 

Access Social Care is committed to ensuring that the chatbot is accessible to everyone. So, after your chat, we may ask you a few questions about yourself to help us check that we are reaching a wide audience. 

You can read more about how Access Social Care uses your personal data here. 

Getting the information right

Our chatbot provides information on subjects that can be life-changing for older or disabled people and their families and supporters. The chatbot is designed to give you information about the law based on your questions and answers in the chatbot. We know how important it is to get this right. 

We make every effort to make sure that the content we put on the chatbot is correct. All of the information included in the chatbot is written or checked by qualified lawyers. But there are some things you need to know:

• The law is complicated, so we have simplified it in the chatbot. This means that we cannot guarantee that the chatbot will always be relevant to your exact situation. 

• The law changes often. Each time the law changes, we will update the chatbot. We carry out regular testing of the chatbot and review all the resources that it signposts users to at least once a year. However, we are only human and sometimes things get missed or mistakes are made. The chatbot is digital and sometimes technology goes wrong. Because of this we cannot guarantee that it will always give everyone accurate and up to date information which is relevant to them. 

• The chatbot is designed to give you information about the law based on your questions and answers in the chatbot. Getting information about the law from the chatbot is not the same as getting legal advice about your own situation from a qualified lawyer. If you think that you might need legal advice, you can find details of solicitors here. 

We ask for your feedback regularly, and we are committed to making changes where you have said that the chatbot was not helpful. 

Sometimes other organisations will be the experts in the subject you ask about. Where we point you to external resources, we will check the reliability of that organisation’s resources and services, and we will let you know if you can expect a charge for the services they offer. However, we are not responsible for the content of other websites and a link to another site does not mean that we endorse the content. 

Access to the chatbot

We know how important it is to have access to information when you need it. People with social care needs and their families and supporters are often short of time. We do our best to make our systems reliable. But we cannot guarantee that the chatbot will always be available when you need it.

We need your help!

Our chatbot needs input from lots of different people so that it can learn to answer a wide range of questions. We are looking for volunteers to help us develop the chatbot. We are particularly interested in hearing from 

1. older or disabled people with a social care need

2. family carers, disabled or older people, and social care staff from Black, Asian or minority ethnicities

We know that people who need social care or, those who support them, may have limited time to spare. The help we are looking for can take as little as ten minutes. If you are interested in finding out more, please email us at enquiries@accesscharity.org.uk. 

Easy Read Documents

The following resources are designed to help you and the people you support think about these issues.

ER162: Our Chatbot - This document helps to explain the purpose and how to use our chatbot

ER163: About The Chatbot - This document provides an overview about what the chatbot tries to do

ER164: Are you at risk - This document explains whether a person is at risk of harm imminently

ER165: You have decided to write a letter - This explains the process of how the chatbot helps to write a letter with the user

ER166: Writing your Letter - This document explains our template letters and that additional infomation will need to be added.

ER167: Finishing your Letter - This describes what to do once all infomation has been added to your letter.

ER168 - Downloading your letter - This document explains how to download the letter once it is completed.

ER173: How we use your information - This explains why we store infomation, how long we keep the infomation and how we use the infomation which a person has consented for us to use.

Find out more

If you have further questions about the chatbot, you can contact us by emailing enquiries@accesscharity.org.uk.