Workzone at the Department of Forensic Medicine

As a university, we have a record-keeping obligation, which means we must save certain documents and correspondence to ensure that:

• the university complies with the statutory requirements of section 15 of the Access to Public Administration Files Act
• critical documentation is preserved and can be found when needed
• we can quickly and efficiently accommodate requests for access to documents
• we uphold efficient and coherent administrative processes.

Documents and correspondence must be stored in an ESDH system that is designed to store documentation securely.

The senior management team has decided that Workzone will be used for cases with record-keeping obligations.

At the Department of Forensic Medicine, we must file material in Workzone which is not filed elsewhere:

Documents received or sent by an administrative authority in connection with its administrative case processing activities must be filed to the extent that the document is important to a case or the case processing in general. The same applies to internal documents in their final form.

So, there are no requirements for the type of documents; they can be Office documents, emails, telephone memos, text messages. They can also be both external and internal documents.

The delimitation lies in the requirement of ‘importance’. The rule of thumb is: Keep in mind whether there is 'something at stake for someone'. This could be financially, image-related, ethically, employment-related, etc.

Communication with external parties is particularly important, and cases that extend over a long period of time are also of particular importance, because we are vulnerable in terms of knowledge loss. Also consider that the Department of Forensic Medicine needs to have historical records in relation to important topics (academic, financial, legal).

Examples:

• Correspondence containing agreements, both in relation to the department's operations and development, and in relation to the individual researchers' research collaborations (e.g. agreements on the allocation of project funding and similar information not necessarily stated in the application etc.).
• Prior negotiations as they have been documented in correspondence
• Applications (if they are not filed in ReApp)
• Correspondence regarding academic questions (e.g. between the state-appointed forensic pathologists regarding smears, or between the forensic departments regarding threshold limits)
• Questions and answers from a requisitioner, including instructions issued (harvesting of hemp plants, for example) (not concerning individual cases where filing is done in the case system)

As much of the department's filing takes place in other systems, the Department of Forensic Medicine has decided that generally only the department management team and employees with AU administrative tasks will be registered as users in Workzone. Other employees with less filing needs can choose whether they want to be users themselves or have their filing done by employees with AU administrative responsibilities.

All employees are responsible for filing sent/receieved material that is required to be filed.

In order to stick to the agreed filing plan (structure) in Workzone for the material required to be filed, the department's superuser and secretariat manager will set up all subject cases in Workzone. They will also maintain the so-called Access rights – which means some predefined access groups that can be added to cases, so that access to the individual subject cases is restricted.

Other users may request to have subject cases set up. Please provide the following information to the department's superuser or secretariat manager: Appropriate name of the case, parties to the case, possibly restricted access.

The other users can then submit documents about the case to the department's superuser or secretariat manager, or – if they are users themselves – add documents to the case on an ongoing basis.