How integrated care systems are using our data
09 Oct 2024
5 min read
Skills for Care’s data is used by a huge variety of organisations and people across our sector and impacts important decisions that set the course for change in adult social care. We wanted to explore how integrated care systems are using our data and hear their thoughts on why it’s vital to their work.
Workforce data plays a crucial role in supporting the integration of health and social care. This data informs decisions and supports effective workforce planning, helping ensure the right services and care are available across health and social care sectors.
Skills for Care’s Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS) is the most comprehensive source of data about the adult social care sector workforce in England. It allows employers to safely store their staff records to support with activities such as workforce planning, and training, as well as to benchmark their organisation against other similar organisations for key workforce metrics. It’s also used to inform our annual reports, such as ‘The State of the Adult Social Care Sector’.
For integrated care systems (ICS), having access to accurate and reliable data about the adult social care sector is essential. ICSs rely on data to understand both national and local workforce dynamics. This includes insights into factors such as average pay for job roles and the number of workers approaching retirement. Understanding these trends helps ICSs anticipate workforce gaps, make better decisions and develop strategies that support the entire system.
Leaders within ICSs emphasise the value of this data in their work. George Matuska, Learning Disability and Autism Lead at Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust, highlights the usefulness of Skills for Care data in understanding workforce roles outside of NHS settings. He said:
Working both regionally and nationally, the Skills for Care data has provided insights into health roles working outside of NHS settings...this has been invaluable.
Alice McGee, Chief People Officer at Leicester, Leicestershire, and Rutland ICB, emphasises that having access to data across both health and social care helps create parity in workforce planning across the entire system and allows her team to prioritise long-term workforce sustainability efforts:
As part of the NHS Long Term Plan, understanding the equivalent workforce data is enabling us to set priorities across health and social care for long term workforce sustainability. The data allows us to consider biggest impacts for all employers across LLR.
Lucy Purdy, Workforce Programme Lead at NHS Frimley ICB, said that Skills for Care data enables her team to work strategically:
The work that Skills for Care do contributes significantly to our ability to develop strategic workforce plans for our integrated care system. It helps us to collaborate on the most impactful interventions.
Catherine Jackson, Head of Workforce Transformation at Bedfordshire, Luton, and Milton Keynes ICB, highlights how Skills for Care’s data helps her team develop place-based approaches to workforce planning:
This data is massively important for us as we build workforce dashboards that represent our health and social care sectors. It is also allowing us to start to build place-based dashboards to support our neighbourhood work. Adult social care makes up almost 50% of our BLMK Health and Social Care workforce and without the Skills for Care data, we would not have the data insights that we do.
For Denise Horton, ICS Retention Lead at NHS Herefordshire and Worcestershire ICB, Skills for Care data provides vital insights into the adult social care sector that would otherwise be unavailable:
It provides me with information I would not otherwise have and helps me to understand the challenges that social care providers have with workforce.
As ICSs continue to work toward health and social care integration, access to reliable workforce data remains key to making informed decisions and building sustainable, collaborative services.
Check our latest ‘The State of the Adult Social Care Sector’ or find out more about ASC-WDS and how to sign up.
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