Help us assess the maturity of social care data in Wales

We’re carrying out research into the maturity of social care data in Wales.

‘Data maturity’ refers to the readiness of an organisation to make best use of the data it holds.

Our aim with this project is to support all local authorities in Wales to understand how they can make best use of the data that’s collected, processed and shared as part of their delivery of social care.

We’ll do this by using a process called a data maturity assessment.

We’ve commissioned Alma Economics to help us carry out the work.

Alma Economics have extensive experience of supporting organisations to get the best out of their data and will help us to develop a data maturity assessment toolkit.

During the assessment, we’ll work with each local authority to understand their current data maturity.

We want this to be a helpful process. It isn’t a way of measuring the performance of an organisation’s social services operation or compliance with technical elements of data processing.

At the end of the project, we’ll send each local authority a summary report and feedback on what steps it can take to improve its data maturity. These reports and feedback won’t be shared outside of the organisation they relate to.

Once all 22 local authorities have been assessed, an overall report will be published on our website. This report will give us an overview of the social care data landscape in Wales. Local authorities will remain anonymous in this report.

We also want to use this project to introduce other opportunities that will help us to collectively improve the way we use social care data in Wales.

This includes looking at how we share social care data through the National Data Resource (NDR) - a new platform that brings together data about health and social care services from across Wales.