Seizing the Digital Opportunities in Social Care

Presently, there are many big questions being asked by providers of social care: are we being properly funded to deliver care and support and, if not, what are the consequences of this? How should the governance of social care be constructed in respect of the balance between national oversight and local commissioning? How do we secure a skilled and values-driven workforce, and ensure that there is a pipeline of talent entering the sector? Should we commit to national pay bargaining for the workforce, as proposed by the Scottish Government? 

These are all important questions, but I want to focus on another: how will the digital and Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution impact the lives of people with support needs and the providers who offer day-to-day support? And to what degree are providers of social care being funded to grow and innovate in this space? 

Productivity and Efficiency Gains

Let me start with the low hanging fruit. Almost all providers of social care are digitising the back office. For some time already, there has been a roll-out of cloud-based systems to support secure and effective business administration: finance and HR packages; care management systems; rota planning platforms. These are important foundations for any contemporary social care provider. And we are beginning to use emergent technologies in AI to deliver further productivity gains: the digital production of meeting notes saves significant time and effort and yields decent results; AI assistance with bureaucratically burdensome tasks like responding to Subject Access Requests is welcome; the use of AI to sense check questions of law or regulation can be a helpful precursor to seeking more formal advice. However, all of these technologies require investment, and oftentimes the management fee built into social care contracts doesn’t cover the costs. In a commissioning landscape where the costs of delivery are not fully recognised by commissioners, this needs to be addressed.  

Staff Experience

We are also exploring how best new technologies can improve the experience of staff working in the social care sector. While many people are drawn to the relational experience of providing care and support, it would be wrong to discount technology as an enabler. Many colleagues are already using their own personal devices to conveniently access organisational platforms or apps, which then enhances care planning and management. Equally, in terms of career development, we want people to access digital learning, in support of their professional development. But we still have a large tail – not everyone is comfortable using technology and so we need to support and train staff to acquire the skills and knowledge.

People We Support

While these gains are all well and good, the real opportunity is in relation to the provision of support to people. We are all experiencing the digital revolution as citizens, but it is still the case that there are segments of the population which are not being fully included and positioned to exploit these technologies. Take banking. My organisation has worked hard over the last few years to engage major financial institutions to consider how we can support people with a learning disability to more effectively and securely connect with digital banking. We take the view that the transition to a cashless society is inexorable – so rather than contest it, we are working with the banks to ensure that disabled people are supported to capitalise on these changes rather than be disadvantaged by them. The same is true in relation to energy. We have emergent technologies that allow energy suppliers to gain valuable safeguarding information from consumers with additional support needs. We are therefore working with partners to advance energy inclusion and ensure that the citizens have secure energy provision and responsive services. 

Or again, we are seeking to transform the lives of people with epilepsy through the application of digital technologies. We operate a tech-enabled specialist hospital, which, by the way, is one of the few examples of the third sector delivering front line secondary care services to NHS patients. Historically, we have complemented this with an outreach service which supports people with complex epilepsy to manage their condition (in comparison to the wider population, they have lower mortality, poorer mental health and experience greater levels of social isolation). However, we are future proofing this work by transitioning towards a digital model where the relational support is delivered through video call and supplemented by home technologies and wearable devices that will spit out metrics that ensure our specialist practitioners are better able to provide support. The model promises to be more efficient, deliver improved access, and secure better outcomes.   

We were able to get this pilot up and running with a small slice of Scottish Government funding, but the reality is that financial support for third sector innovation is the exception rather than the rule. Insufficient resources are being put into digital innovation beyond the big public sector bureaucracies. Third sector organisations are fleet of foot and can lead on innovation, but in the absence of seed funding good ideas go to waste. To offer a case in point, two years ago we proposed to revolutionise the facilitation of Self-Directed Support by creating a digital one-stop-shop which would assist people with support needs to direct a personal budget, outline their goals and outcomes, establish (if they wished) themselves as an employer of personal assistants, manage payroll and associated financial matters, establish workable rotas – all through a digital application which had been tried and tested in New Zealand. But there were no takers. Everyone thought it was a good idea; everyone could see that New Zealand were doing it better than we were; but no-one wanted to fund it. So instead of innovation we got inertia. Instead of transformation we got timidity.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can lead the way in the application of digital technologies in social care. But only if we invest in the future.    

Ron Culley, Chief Executive of Quarriers: DCCS Delivery Group member