Social Care Data Finder

The public health emergency continues to shine a light on what we know and, more importantly, do not know about social care. Social care is amongst the thorniest of domestic policy challenges facing the United Kingdom and, yet, garnering any kind of understanding of it involves a level of detective work that, all too often, leads to a dead-end or cold trail.

Our own work has made extensive use of publicly available data and, to help others, we have produced a Social Care Data Finder which comprises of a timeline with links to social care datasets that have been openly published in the UK since January 1^st 2020. The aim is to maintain a data finder that can be used as a resource for social care research, so the timeline will be updated at regular intervals to capture the publication of new datasets and we welcome suggestions for inclusion. At present, our Social Care Data Finder serves as a portal to data published by pertinent national bodies, but we will move to incorporate local datasets and others in due course.

This will be updated on a regular basis, so please come back soon.

We have also teamed up with the Health Foundation on a project to improve data analytics on social care during the pandemic and afterwards. We will be focused on:

• Highlighting the importance of social care data;
• Identifying the data assets that can be deployed immediately; and
• Recommending what’s needed for a great data and analytics system in the longer term.