Social care data collection

Care and Support Minister, Norman Lamb has announced an overhaul of how social care data is collected in order to help improve the way care and support is measured.

In order to support the new ways of collecting data, the Department of Health has agreed to give local authorities an extra £11.13 million of funding for implementation.

The data will be collected by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) and published annually. The statistics will help to improve social care standards by looking at the results people who use care and support are supported to achieve, rather than counting activities and processes.

In 2010, the HSCIC led a review, working closely with councils to consider the types of data that councils would need in order to understand how well they are doing in providing personalised, high quality care and support.

The review recommended changes to data collections, which will be phased in over the next couple of years, including:

• A new safeguarding collection be brought in, replacing the current Abuse of Vulnerable Adults collection;
• a new data item on staff qualifications be added to the National Minimum Data Set for Social Care for September 2014; and
• That the existing social care activity and finance collections be replaced by a new collection on Short and Long-Term Support and new finance collection.

This new data will help local authorities to identify areas of improvement and give local people the information they need to hold councils to account, helping to make them genuinely answerable to local people for the quality of local care and support.