What good looks like for digital in adult social care self-assessment tool

This self-assessment exercise aims to enable you as a council to:

• Baseline and benchmark yourself. This may be to other councils in your region, at a national level or statistically similar councils. It also provides a baseline to allow you to measure your progress over time
   
• Understand your achievements and your gaps for focus. This allows you to identify and understand your strengths and areas of improvements and use evidence where appropriate to demonstrate this such as for CQC inspection
   
• Develop your vision. This allows you to establish your priorities and where you want to be on your digital journey
   
• Make a case for change. This allows you to evidence what needs to change, why and how you will implement that change.

This tool allows you as a council to understand your state of digital maturity. It should also provide an opportunity for you to develop your vision and where you want to make improvements. With both your starting and end point set out, we hope the real benefit of this tool will be enabling you to move forward on your improvement journey.

This tool provides a comprehensive look at what different stages of being a digitally mature council looks like. It is not designed to be completed quickly or on your own.

The tool is designed to stimulate thinking, reflection and discussion within your council. 

Councils will get the most out of this tool if they undertake it as a group exercise or activity. Who you work with to complete the tool will be specific to your council but you may consider the following types of people who may be helpful:

• connectivity, digital skills and inclusion leads
• ICT and digital project leads
• data and performance management leads
• cyber security leads
• assurance leads in adult social care
• adult social care operational leads – principal social workers and occupational therapists 
• technology enabled care (TEC) leads
• adult social care commissioners
• integrated care board digital leads
• residents who access care and support

We encourage councils to undertake this work alongside their regional peers to enable benchmarking, opportunity for peer-to-peer work and focus on regional improvement priorities. We are working with the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS) to ensure there is support across all nine regions.

The individual results of your self-assessment tool are shared with yourself and if agreed your ADASS region. The results are not shared further and are not used in any way to rate councils. 
 

Please request a copy of the tool by contacting our social care digital team on [email protected]

We will then send you a unique link to the self-assessment tool along with supporting resources which includes guidance for the tool and an offline version of the tool that can be printed or shared to aid completion with colleagues.

Please note the self-assessment tool is not available openly online to ensure that we can best support councils.
 

Once the tool is submitted you will get a pdf summary of your answers that you submitted automatically.

We will then be in touch with you shortly to offer you a summary report which sets out your status for each outcome measure, how it aligns with the CQC assessment framework and initial next steps to consider. It also sets out key documents or evidence you may wish to explore.

If you have undertaken the self-assessment as part of your ADASS region, we will also provide further regional analysis and benchmarking information.

We ask that you are willing to share your results to enable any benchmarking information to be shared with you. If you chose not to share your results we will not be able to offer any benchmarking or comparison for your council.

We have a direct support offer for councils who have identified as being early on their digital transformation journey.
 

For councils who are earlier on in their digital transformation journey, we are able to offer a free direct support offer.

Our aim through our support offer is to specifically enable councils to move forward on their digital improvement journey. 

Our support to councils will enable them to:

• appreciate their levels of digital maturity against the seven success criteria
• prioritise areas for development
• create their development plan

We offer up to a maximum of five sessions, which are to be delivered over an agreed timeframe. We can offer the below elements to support your council in developing their development plan as part of our support offer:

We recognise that each council will have different needs so we will work with you to scope and understand where your council is and how we can best meet your needs.

For further information about our support offer please contact [email protected]