PROJECT NIHR206126.11
High-quality data are vital to best organise and improve adult social care. Recognising this, the Department of Health and Social Care required service providers to monthly update an online system (Capacity Tracker) with information about their services such as about spare capacity and staffing levels. This can be used by local decision makers such as care planners, local authority commissioners and/or hospital discharge planners to plan timely care and support for people, and by national policy makers at the Department of Health and Social Care as they develop social care policy.
We will engage different people who have been involved in developing and using Capacity Tracker, including those who update data and those using it for planning services and care and support for individuals, to seek their views on its development and implementation, how well it functions and what the potential is for the future. We will also examine data in Capacity Tracker to explore quality issues.
We will interview a group of people with national overviews of Capacity Tracker, including sector representatives, policy makers, and those who manage the system. We will then interview samples of people who i) provide data to the system (social care provider organisations), and ii) those who use the system in their decisions (e.g. local commissioners and care planners). A further strand of the project will undertake statistical analysis of the Capacity Tracker data to examine the confidence we can have in its quality, e.g. are people updating it regularly and in a way that gives a sense that it is accurate.
The study has the potential to help us understand issues around collecting routine data in adult social care, how to improve this and make it more useful to improve care and support for individuals, to better manage local systems and to develop policy.
Regular updates will be provided to DHSC colleagues. The project will produce written reports and academic papers.
Michael Clark (Lead), Emily Freeman, Jacqui Damant, Jose-Luis Fernandez, Sam Rickman
