Data and performance

Using insight to deliver better care

A whole range of data is available to support your council’s strategic planning and benchmarking, as well as the management of operational performance. Councils typically have specialists who are qualified and experienced in data analysis and you should develop a good working relationship with them, and between them and your own teams.

Using data effectively ensures strategic planning is evidence-based and helps to demonstrate that you are commissioning and providing the right services for people.

Strategic planning data includes:

Strategic planning data can be used to answer questions such as:

  • What is the need for adult social services now and in the future?
  • Where is the need coming from – e.g. particular areas or groups?
  • Are needs being well met and to what extent is supply of services sufficient to meet demand now and in the future?
  • What are the alternatives options for meeting need?

You can use data to understand not just the local population as a whole, but also the needs of specific groups. You can explore associations between variables, such as between deprivation and demand for adult social services (remembering that correlation does not mean causation).

You can also extrapolate trends and model plausible future scenarios for planning, e.g. what will demand for adult social services be in ten years’ time (with the caveat that all models are wrong, and some are useful)?

Benchmarking data is useful for comparing your local authority with others. Routinely available benchmarking data include:

Two health warnings:

First, most benchmarking data is a year or two out of date, so the situation may have changed in your area in a way that is not yet reflected.

Second, while much of the data is defined reasonably precisely, local authorities can still interpret these definitions differently, so there may be circumstances where you are ‘comparing apples with oranges’.

Benchmarking data are perhaps more useful at helping you to ask questions rather than giving you definitive answers.

It is vital you have a good understanding of the performance data for all social services pathways: initial contact, Care Act assessments and reviews, arranging services for those who are eligible, financial assessments and safeguarding. You will need data from your care management system, as well as from HR and finance.

Operational management data can be used to explore activity, timeliness and outcomes and answer questions such as: how many people are entering and progressing along the various pathways? How many staff do I need to cope with this demand? Are the pathways adding value to people’s lives? Is the decision making financially sustainable?

It is helpful to have both a retrospective view – such as asking how many Care Act assessments were completed in the last month and how many were completed within timescales? – as well as a real time view – for example, how many Care Act assessments are open right now and how many have breached timescales?

Most councils have queues for assessments and services, and it is important to enumerate these in terms of size and duration of wait, and to demonstrate you are managing the risk of those waiting by reviewing regularly and prioritising.

Your data should allow you to understand overall performance, as well as at team and individual social worker levels, so you can ensure the workload is equitably distributed and you can highlight examples of good practice. It should be easy to examine aggregate data to find individual names and seek assurance that people are safe.

Outcomes are important: these might include how people’s needs were met; if they were eligible for local authority funded care and support – and the associated costs; and customer feedback about people’s experience of the pathways and if their individual outcomes were satisfied. You should consider complementing the data with qualitative audits and surveys to explore issues in more depth.

Operational management data must be readily available to operational managers and staff so they can easily interrogate the performance of their own teams. A range of tools can help, including PowerBi and Arcgis. Operational management data will also be reported at directorate and corporate level within the local authority, as well as to scrutiny committees and by partners such as the NHS.

Make sure you have a clear narrative that highlights strengths, areas for improvement (and how you will address these), interdependencies with other services and actions pending.

You should try to present data in a way that is intelligible to the public: councillors need clear information on which to base their decisions, and local people should be able to understand adult social services so they can hold the local authority to account.

Using data effectively requires the right culture, skills and tools. The cultural challenge is to encourage all staff to be curious and ask questions, to reach conclusions based on evidence rather than anecdote, and to seek to understand the whole population and their entire range of services, rather than just the person in front of them.

All commissioners and operational managers should have basic skills to interpret and present data effectively, such as statistics, epidemiology and data visualisation.

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