Website launched to compare adult social care performance between council areas

The government has launched a website comparing adult social care performance between areas that it says will help local people hold their council to account.

The Adult Social Care Outcomes site provides data for each area in England 21 indicators including direct payment take-up rates, the self-reported quality of life of a sample of service users and rates of delayed discharges from hospital attributable to a lack of social care.

People will then be able to compare performance in their area for each indicator against that of the country as a whole, their region and comparable authorities.

“We want people to be able to know how well their local authority is performing,” said care and support minister Norman Lamb. “This will highlight those councils doing really well, but it will also enable people to hold their council to account if it fails to deliver good results from adult social care services, such as helping people to live independently or giving them genuine choice and control over their care and support.”

The indicators are taken from the Adult Social Care Outcomes Framework, data on which is collected each year by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC).

Though the information centre publishes the results every year, the new website is designed to make them more accessible to the public and enable people to compare easily their area’s performance against others’.

The initiative was welcomed by Healthwatch England, the statutory “consumer champion” for health and social care patients and service users.

Chair Anna Bradley said local Healthwatch organisations would find the data particularly useful in working out “where to focus their attention and ensure their communities have access to the safe, compassionate and high quality care they deserve”.