October 21st 2022
The latest State of Care report from the Care Quality Commission makes for sobering reading. It reveals a health and care system in gridlock with an estimated half a million people waiting for a social care assessment, support package or review.
The report also highlights the role that access to data can have on improving care:
“To understand what is driving performance, local leaders need to bring together data and information from providers and other local stakeholders, and agree success measures that are focused on people’s overall experience of care, not limited to organisation or sector.
“Better quality data and increased data sharing are critical not only to planning for people’s care needs but to understanding and tackling inequalities in people’s experience of and access to care.”
Michelle Corrigan, Programme Director of Better Security, Better Care responded to the report saying:
“The Better Security, Better Care programme strongly agrees that sharing good quality data is critical to planning individuals’ care and the wider health and care system. We welcome and support safe and appropriate data sharing. But we also ask all health and care organisations to ensure that data protection and cyber security are central to all discussions about increasing access to information. Our support partners across the country are ready and able to help care providers work through their data protection arrangements.”
Contact
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Notes to Editors
About Better Security, Better Care
Better Security, Better Care is a national and local support programme to help adult social care providers to store and share information safely. It covers paper and digital records.
The main focus of the Better Security, Better Care programme is to help care providers to understand the importance of data and cyber security, and complete an annual, online self-assessment using the Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT).
Better Security, Better Care is led by a programme board whose members are NHS Transformation Directorate, NHS Digital, the Local Government Association, the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services and, Digital Social Care on behalf of care providers.
The DSPT is a free, online self-assessment tool developed by the NHS and adapted specifically for the social care sector. It is based on the official national data standards which are common across both health and social care, and guides organisations through a series of questions and tips to help them check what standards they meet – and how to improve. Organisations are then given a status – Approaching Standards, Standards Met or Standards Exceeded – which they can provide as evidence to funders, inspectors and professional partners.
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