Case study
Supporting Social Care Wales to unlock impactful digital innovation
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We’re delighted with the support Basis has provided to help us understand how to better support digital innovation in social care in Wales
Lisa Trigg, Social Care Wales
Impactful Digital Innovation
Social Care Wales, the leading regulatory and improvement body for social care services in Wales, has recently embraced a new government-mandated role to provide leadership for social care innovation. To help them hit the ground running, they asked for our support to help them understand the particularly complex landscape of digital innovation in social care across the country.
Working with the internal team, we aimed to identify ways that Social Care Wales could have the greatest impact, building on partners’ existing capabilities and on the lessons learned from previous digital social care initiatives across the UK.
We share Social Care Wales’s vision of leveraging digital to radically improve the social care system for those who work in it and those who access care and support. Figuring out how to do this in practice is a bit tricky - but finding clarity in messy problems alongside people that care passionately about the subject is what we love doing. So we were pretty excited to be involved in the work.
How we helped
Good question. As Social Care Wales identified, this is a complex landscape! Digital innovation in social care is unevenly distributed, varying across adults and children’s services, geographic regions and organisations.
When discussing digital innovation in social care, the conversation often turns to robots in care homes, and references the growing policy focus on Technology-Enabled Care to support independent living for our ageing population. However, in many places, ‘digital innovation’ may mean something much simpler. Research suggests that many care homes offer only a basic connectivity package; offering functional wifi may be ‘innovative’ enough to make a difference.
Moreover, while adult social care can and does benefit from significant technology investment through centralised NHS-funded organisations, the social care system remains fragmented - made up of a variety of bodies including local authorities, small private providers, third sector providers and individual personal assistants - leading to varied use of digital. Children’s services also prioritise face-to-face interactions to ensure safeguarding, which in some cases limits opportunities for technological solutions to scale.
We also found that it's impossible to talk about digital innovation in social care without talking about digital inclusion. Despite the potential of digital technologies to enhance care, we heard that some services in Wales struggle with basic technologies. There’s already a thriving digital inclusion agenda in Wales, and we recommend that Social Care Wales throw their weight behind this to ensure social care benefits from this work.
Although digital inclusion is crucial, we mustn’t be disheartened or overlook the potential of exciting new technologies. Numerous pilot projects across the UK have demonstrated their value in social care but lack the necessary funding and support for widespread implementation. For instance, the Multi-Agency Safeguarding Tracker (MAST), developed through NHS England’s Social Care Digital Innovation programme, is an innovative digital approach to data sharing which improves decision making around safeguarding and cuts frontline workers’ administrative time. MAST is currently being adopted in South Wales.
If this has whet your appetite, stay tuned for our report! You’ll be able to delve further into our findings and discoveries when it’s published on Social Care Wales’ website in the Summer.
Our approach
Our approach included rigorous desk research and expert interviews with 19 key stakeholders, from academia, technology partners, charities, government bodies, and local authorities - sharing invaluable insights from their varied perspectives within the broader ecosystem.
To tap into the collective wisdom of our stakeholders, we facilitated two co-design workshops with Social Care Wales’s partners - one at the beginning, and another at the conclusion of our process. Drawing on our expertise in Liberating Structures, we encouraged participants to help us to extract deeper insight from our research findings, facilitating fruitful discussions about a way forward for Social Care Wales.
By the end of this collaborative process, we’d identified three opportunity areas where Social Care Wales can make a meaningful impact and bridge existing gaps in support for digital innovation within social care in Wales. As mentioned above, we produced a final report outlining our findings and recommendations; we’ll link this here once it’s published.
Beyond the report, we thought there was an opportunity to test opportunities that might help enable digital innovation as part of the project
The impact of the work
Social Care Wales was pleased with the clarity of our analysis and is already preparing a plan in response. It is also planning to publish the database on its new website. This is great, but the real impact of this work is going to be longer term.
"Basis have been a pleasure to work with and have really dug deep into the issues around digital innovation in social care. They engaged really well with a broad range of people and gave us some great insights into some of the issues people are facing and how we could complement support that’s already out there”"
Stephanie Griffith, Innovation Manager at Social Care Wales
“We’re delighted with the support Basis has provided to help us understand how to better support digital innovation in social care in Wales. Basis has provided invaluable guidance and support to help us understand the gaps, as well as identifying promising ideas for supporting people in social care to access the excellent projects already underway in Wales and farther afield”
Lisa Trigg, Assistant Director of Research, Data and Intelligence at Social Care Wales
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