Discovery on transferring data to the Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set

We were asked by Skills for Care to explore the experience of users who update a large amount of data to their Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS).

In particular, we were asked to explore how viable it would be to automate the transfer of data from the HR and other data systems used within large organisations, to ASC-WDS.

We focused on users working for large organisations that usually update ASC-WDS using a bulk upload tool. These users are in the minority but account for a large proportion of the data collected.

We carried out a programme of user research to establish what HR and other data systems were commonly being used and how, and to understand the current process of gathering and preparing data.

We analysed survey responses from large and small organisations, interviewed current and potential users, and carried out remote observation sessions. We also spoke to stakeholders, reviewed previous research and interviewed data system suppliers.

Our findings showed early on that there was significant diversity in the number of different data systems being used and that there would be no ‘magic button’ solution to transfer the data for the majority of these users.

We ran a co-design workshop to explore other ways of improving the user experience. From this, we developed a number of concepts and took these to users to get feedback.

We concluded the discovery with a set of recommendations for Skills for Care to consider, including pilot work to test a number of hypotheses, and possible changes that could be made as part of the ‘business as usual’ development of the service.