Social care - personal assistants: current data sources and future work

Background

For the purposes of data collection, a Personal Assistant (PA) is defined as any person directly contracted by someone in receipt of Self-Directed Support option 1 and/or Independent Living Fund. The person who is in receipt of these payments may contract one or more PAs to meet their support needs. Some people contract with PAs via other funding streams such as the Disabled Student Allowance of Student Awards Agency Scotland; the daily living component of the Adult or Child Disability Payment or by using their personal funds. However, there is no way at present to collect data on this workforce. The Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) has responsibility for publishing data and intelligence on the workforce in the social service sector in Scotland. The SSSC refers to and works with two main sets of data: The first is ‘workforce’ data; workers who work in either registered care services or local authority social work services. The second is ‘registration’ data; all those who are in active employment in specific roles and services within the social service sector, where mandatory registration is in place. Neither of these data sets include PAs. There is an annual Social Care data collection by PHS which counts the number of people who are recipients of SDS option 1 and includes the option to indicate if a service user received support from a PA contract. However, data recording varies across local authorities and not everyone is able to provide the requested data. In England, it is similar data on option 1 recipients which is used to derive the PA workforce.

The size of the current PA workforce in social care in Scotland is not currently known. It is important for workforce planning purposes to develop a method for calculating this workforce as it is currently and as it will be in the future.

A method to provide robust data and calculate size of the whole PA workforce is needed to enable Scottish Government (SG) to:

• comply with the Independent Review of Adult Social Care (IRASC) recommendation to fully recognise PAs as a part of the social care workforce; and
• meet the commitment set out in the published joint SG/COSLA Health and Social Care National Workforce Strategy which requires SG/COSLA to quantify the size of the social care workforce for workforce planning purposes and to publish full health and social care workforce projections for one, three, five and ten years ahead.

For medium term, it is necessary to explore all options and identify further opportunities. All agree that there will not be one collection method as using the existing data provided by Scotland Excel (SXL), even projected forwards would not give us a clear indication of supply and demand for PAs via SDS option 1 and ILFS as these are affected by many other variables.

Feedback from key partners and stakeholders, such as SDSS, has highlighted a need for greater numbers of PAs in the social care workforce to fulfil current and future demand for PAs to support individuals. PA Programme Board members have told us that some people who require social care support are unable to obtain any care due to lack of option 1 availability while others are being pushed into more traditional routes for social care because of the lack of PAs. Therefore, any analysis needs to look at current workforce size and estimate the future size, taking into account the pressures to increase this workforce.

Short term priorities

• To work out the existing workforce size in social care.
• To begin to scope out options to estimate the number of vacancies in the PA workforce and then invest in a method to be able to consider an accurate PA vacancy rate.

Medium term priorities

• To develop the method to measure the whole workforce size including for children and young people.
• To scope out workforce planning requirements for PAs for 3,5,7 and 10 years ahead assuming current demand for PAs.

Longer term priorities

• To scope out the likely future need for PAs. This involves an element of future proofing considering issues such as changing demographics, move to prioritise proactive and preventive focus and further development towards a National Care Service.