How to use ASC-WDS to identify and manage change
22 Feb 2022
3 min read
Skills for Care’s Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS) is a free service which allows social care providers to enter, edit and review data about their organisation. It can help providers to identify where there may be areas for improvement and understand the upskilling their staff might need to cope with changes.
Understanding your organisation to identify the need for change
ASC-WDS helps you to understand your current workforce by giving managers somewhere to store and access information about staff in one place.
The service provides a benchmarking feature which allows you to compare your organisation against similar care providers in your area, and this can help to highlight opportunities for changes and improvements. For example, you can compare metrics such as turnover, which may help you to identify a need to provide further support around staff retention if your rates are higher than average.
You can also compare your organisation’s metrics to ‘Good’ and ‘Outstanding’ providers to be inspired by those providers that are achieving the top Care Quality Commission (CQC) ratings.
Developing your team to be change ready
When considering changes across your organisation, it’s important to ensure your team will be suitably skilled and resourced to implement those changes. An up-to-date ASC-WDS account can help you to assess the resources and capacity within your team, such as current staff vacancies, qualifications among your team, and any training required.
The service provides training reports which can help you to identify the training needs required for all your staff to confidently embrace new processes and ways of working. For each role within your team, you can set mandatory training requirements and the service will keep you updated when training needs to be refreshed or mandatory training is yet to be completed.
The training reports can also help employers to identify where any skills gaps may exist within the team. This can inform planning around upskilling your existing staff, succession planning, and recruitment decisions around what new expertise you need in your team.
Understanding sector data to find opportunities for change
Understanding the trends and needs across the whole sector, can help social care managers to find opportunities for their organisation to explore.
Skills for Care uses the data provided by adult social care providers in ASC-WDS to create national and regional data reports, and to provide insights about the sector which can be found on our website. We’re the largest source of workforce intelligence for the adult social care sector.
This workforce intelligence can help you to understand your local market, and the sector nationally. This includes insights around your local labour market, and patterns in workforce issues such as turnover and pay rates.
What social care managers have to say
This is what some of our existing ASC-WDS users had to say about how the service benefits them and their teams:
The benchmarking function is great for discussing aims and objectives for managers and their service, such as monitoring and improving staff turnover, management of staff absence, or increasing percentage of staff with qualifications relevant to their role.
Marisa Spice
Learning and Development Manager, Nellsar Ltd
For us workforce planning is really vital, especially when we’re thinking of developing the organisation.
[ASC-WDS] has been really helpful in helping us to understand who our workforce is.
Sophie Chester-Glyn
Managing Director, Manor Community
Find out more about ASC-WDS and sign-up.
See more information and resources about managing change on our #ManagingChange spotlight page.
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