An adult social care information system designed to boost performance management within local authorities is being formally launched today at the National Children and Adult Services Conference.
The National Adult Social Care Intelligence Service , which has been operating since July, brings together all centrally collected data on adult social services in areas including performance against targets, service volumes and spending patterns.
Council performance management staff can search the online system to find accessible information, including graphs, on how their authority compares against similar councils, in order to identify areas for improvement. Previously this would have required them analysing dense spreadsheets of data themselves.
Nascis includes all data collected by the NHS Information Centre for the 2008-9 financial year, but the centre's director of social care information delivery, Robert Lake, who is responsible for the service, said it was planning to bid for Department of Health funding to collect information on a month-by-month basis.
He said this would require the centre being able to "suck up" information from councils rather than having authorities submit data, which he estimated would require £1.5m in capital funding over the next two years.
The centre has just confirmed the data it will be collecting from councils for 2010-11, which includes its first collection on safeguarding vulnerable adults, comprising data on alleged offences, victims and perpetrators and responses from agencies.
Lake said this would be voluntary but was likely to become mandatory in the future.
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