When most people hear the word “data” they tend to switch off, but not an innovative Norfolk partnership, which is using quality information to plan their future workforce.
Norfolk and Suffolk Care Support and Norfolk county council HR shared services have joined forces to work with partners to support workforce development. Norfolk has one of the highest ageing populations in the UK.
That work has won a national prize, picking up the Skills for Care Accolade for Best Use of Workforce Intelligence, proving that data, used well, is vital in making sure Norfolk will have a workforce that can meet local needs.
The two organisations have been using the National Minimum Data Set for Social Care (NMDS-SC) since 2012.
“NMDS-SC provides access to workforce data that can be used to support targeted workforce planning,” says Norfolk and Suffolk Care Support Ltd chief operating officer Christine Futter. “It allows us to analyse both an individual employer’s needs and wider local and county strategic needs”.
The partnership uses NMDS-SC to pass workforce intelligence information to the Norfolk Strategic Workforce Group (NSWG). This group reflects a wide range of stakeholders from health and social care statutory, voluntary and independent agencies including Norfolk and Suffolk Care Support and identifies priorities for workforce development in the region.
NMDS-SC is also used with Insight, a national software company which offers data for communities across the country, to target workforce development grants to develop seamless social care services in Norfolk. NMDS-SC allows the partnership to provide a detailed profile of the workforce and demographics.
The NMDS-SC Eastern Regional Report gave the partnership a clearer understanding of the workforce in the county, benchmarking against national data to prioritise developments, change, planning, projects and services.
Futter says: “We have used NMDS-SC dashboards, requested bespoke data and used our own Norfolk market intelligence, through Insight to gain a better understanding of local area workforce profiles.”
This strategic workforce planning is being done because the county’s ageing population is projected to significantly increase by 2030. The team knows that in Norfolk there are 27,800 people working in social care and care workers who provide direct care constitute around 75% of the workforce. They also know over 75% are employed in the independent sector, along with approximately 15% by direct employers.
Of particular concern is the high turnover rates which are as high as 46% in home care in addition with the vacancy rates for care workers. the NMDS-SC tells them the average age of the care worker is 43 and it is projected that approximately 20% are expected to retire in the next 10 years.
There are over 640 establishments in Norfolk providing registered and unregistered services and 94,691 unpaid carers. The estimated value of the care these carers provide is equated to £1.6bn annually. Demographic trends project an increasingly ageing population with numbers of people aged 65 and over due to increase by 57% by 2025, with 30% of these with some social care needs.
The data show there are currently over 15,500 people with dementia in Norfolk and that number is projected to rise by 71% over the next 20 years. Around 6,000 live in one of the county’s 268 residential care homes. The rest are enabled to live in the community with the aid of unpaid carers supported by domiciliary home care, backed-up by statutory healthcare providers.
Christine and her team are in no doubt that using quality data will be critical in making sure Norfolk has the right workforce with the right skills with the right values in the right places to support local people.
“NMDS-SC offers all employers of adult social care a tool to analyse their workforce. It provides them with robust intelligence on which to base decisions on how best to develop their workforce to meet the demands of their services. It assists employers to identify any gaps in their workforce skills, to enable targeted learning and development plans to be developed.”
“For employers it is a very useful tool for using the collated data for the completion of the Provider Information Return, especially section 5.
For more information about how to use NMDS-SC go to www.nmds-sc-online.org.uk.
