Care Home Data Review - Full Report

Achieving Our Vision

As stated at the start of this report the vison for care home data is to work in partnership across the care home sector and care home analytical community, to achieve meaningful, timely, data and analysis to support positive outcomes for care home residents and workforce.

Many of the challenges reported in this review have previously been written about^[53]. The COVID-19 pandemic magnified basic and fundamental gaps with Scotland’s care home data which impacted on the availability of evidence to inform key decision making during this national health & care emergency. A priority from this review is to learn from the experiences of the care home sector, the care home analytical community, and others, to bring about improvement to achieve our vision.

This review has identified a large number of recommendations for improvements around care home data. As previously noted, implementing these recommendations will require a considerable programme of work and will require resource from across the care home sector. The Care Home Data Working Group will bring together a wide range of stakeholders from across the sector to consider the prioritisation, sequencing and resourcing of work to implement the recommendations from the review, and present options to the relevant governance boards.

Having a clear accountable governance structure should enable more strategic prioritisation and resource allocation across the organisations involved in the collection and analysis of care home data. The work of the Social Care Data & Intelligence Programme Board, Data Delivery Sub Board and Data Standards Sub Board aims to achieve this (see Annex 1 for further information).

The challenges we face in improving care home data (& the subsequent analysis of that data) are exacerbated by the historic focus on health data and analysis, that has resulted in an imbalance of resources for data and analysis between health and social care. This imbalance was highlighted by the Office for Statistics Regulation:

“This imbalance exists at all levels, from the national bodies responsible for publishing statistics down to the teams and systems supporting data collection in local areas”.

The resources to undertake the work will need to come from existing resources, new resources, or changing the way we work. Resourcing is also about how we use and develop the skills and expertise of our care home analytical community, sharing and collaborating and using technology to work more efficiently. This review is also at a time where across the public sector and social care, we are working within constraints (financial and other e.g. workforce vacancies) therefore the prioritisation of the recommendations and resources will be central to what can be delivered and by when.

To ensure that we can establish and, importantly, maintain momentum on care home data improvement work, data producers may need to investigate the potential to pause or stop current analytical collections / outputs in order to divert resource to data and process development. Similarly, it may also be necessary both now and into the future to consider the potential for any pivoting of available wider data and analytical resources across health and social care.

To maximise our limited data resources and increase efficiency, better sharing of data between organisations is essential. This will both help reduce duplication for data providers and, where appropriate, help fully utilise the analytical capacity in the sector and increase the depth and range of possible analysis. This is discussed further in the ‘Information Governance’ and ‘Insights & Relevance’ chapters.

Technology is also an important resource, particularly in helping make data collections and analysis more efficient and timely. Some considerations regarding making better use of technology are considered in more detail in the chapter on ‘Data Systems and Standardisation’. The Care Home Data Working Group will ensure that issues relating to care home data are included as part of the much wider considerations relating to improvements in technology and infrastructure across the whole of health and social care.

The research and innovation sector also have an integral role in providing analytical capacity, evidence and expertise to help realise our vision. To identify and answer meaningful questions about care homes, residents and the care home workforce, researchers need to be able to work in collaboration with those who are experiencing care or working to deliver and plan for care. More can be done to develop links with the wider research community, and this will be set out by the Social Care Analytical Unit (Scottish Government) in due course.

The Care Home Data Working Group will consider the prioritisation of the recommendations from the review and set out a phased programme of work for implementation. The Working Group will then lead and manage improvements to the care home data landscape, specifically to ensure a coherent suite of data collections, reduce the burden on data providers and meet the existing and emerging needs of data users.