The 2021 government white paper, People at the Heart of Care sets out a 10-year vision to reform adult social care, recognising the power and potential of technology and data to improve the quality and safety of care. As part of the data proposals in the white paper, the Digitising Social Care (DiSC) programme’s support to providers to adopt digital social care records will enable the automated collection of necessary data in a secure and transparent way, reducing the administrative burden on providing information and freeing up more time to care.
Building on these commitments, the adult social care data strategy, Care Data Matters published in December 2023, outlines priorities for how social care data is collected, shared, and used and how the quality and availability of this data can be improved at both national and local levels. It states that these improvements in data use can deliver:
- more joined up care for people, with information shared effectively between professionals
- more time and resources for people who provide and commission care and support, so they can focus on providing high quality, personalised services
- greater understanding of people’s care journeys - whether that be for people who draw on care or unpaid carers
- good practice, areas for improvement and research into how care is commissioned, provided, and integrated with healthcare
- better management and oversight of the health and care system at local, regional, and national levels, making more effective use of resources
The draft RMDS is one element of the digitising social care programme’s work to “streamline ‘what’ data is collected from providers into a core minimum dataset, and ‘how’ the data is collected” as outlined in the strategy.
Extensive consultation and engagement with the care sector stakeholders has been carried out to identify and understand registered adult social care providers’ data needs and inform the development of this first draft of the RMDS.