Tell us what you think about new draft data standards for social care
We're inviting people across social care to review and provide feedback on draft data standards for the sector in Wales.
The standards aim to make information easier to record, understand and share consistently across organisations and systems. We’ve developed them with people working in a range of roles, including practitioners, managers and data and digital specialists.
This feedback process is an important step in developing standards that are clear, practical and useful for the people who use them.
By sharing your views, you'll help make sure the standards reflect the realities of social care practice and meet the needs of the sector.
How to provide feedback
We'll publish the draft standards in three blocks of 'use cases', which reflect different situations where information needs to be recorded and shared.
The first block is now open for feedback, and we'll publish the remaining blocks in the coming months. Each block will be open for six weeks.
The first block is open until 2 December and covers:
- front door – information about referrals to social care, such as a person's initial or subsequent contact with the front door to social care services
- hospital discharge – information needed to support a person’s safe and timely discharge from hospital into an appropriate care setting
- reablement – information needed to identify people who could benefit from reablement and support them to access a short-term reablement service
- case closure – information that needs to be recorded when a person’s social care record is formally closed.
The subsequent blocks will cover themes such as:
- adult safeguarding
- carers (adults and young carers)
- deprivation of liberty safeguards
- children requiring care and support
- child protection
- children looked after
- demographics
- the workforce.
We'd be grateful if you could review the drafts and share your thoughts through the short feedback forms provided in each block.
Provide feedback on the first block of draft standards now.
You don't need to be a data expert to take part. If you use, record, manage or rely on information in social care, your experience and insight can help improve the standards.
Why are we developing data standards?
Organisations across health and social care have been exploring ways to improve how information is shared for many years.
A common challenge is that information can be recorded differently between organisations, teams and systems. Even when people are recording similar information, they may use different terms, definitions or approaches.
This can make it harder to compare information, share data when needed and build a consistent understanding of people's needs and experiences.
Data standards help address this challenge by creating a shared understanding of important information.
By agreeing common definitions and terminology, organisations can have more confidence that information means the same thing wherever it's recorded or used.
We're working with BetterGov and Answer Digital to deliver this work.
What are minimum operating data standards?
Minimum operating data standards are an agreed set of essential data items, definitions and terminology.
They define important pieces of information and how they should be understood, helping to create consistency across organisations and systems.
The aim is not to make every organisation work in exactly the same way. Instead, minimum operating data standards focus on the information that’s most important to share and understand consistently.
This approach helps create consistency while allowing organisations and services to continue working in ways that meet local needs.
Learn more on our data standards page.
We'll always do our best to explain this work clearly, but we understand that you may still come across some words or phrases that aren't familiar from time to time. If you do, you might find the word you’re looking for in our A to Z of data standards terms.
Example: What's the date? -
We can write a date in several different ways:
- 1 June 2028
- 30-Nov-12
- 07/04/2025
Most of us would see these and quickly recognise them as a date.
In the UK, we’d read the last of those dates as being 7 April. In the USA, they’d read it as 4 July, because the month comes first in American dates.
This shows how easy it can be to confuse the meaning behind a piece of data if we don’t have a standard way of describing it.
What if we all described dates as a four-number year followed by a three-letter month and a two-number day?
The date above would be written as:
2025-APR-07
If everyone uses the same format then it makes sense to the machines (and people) that need to share this information with each other.
In this case, we’ve also made sure that it’s difficult to get the date elements mixed up, because we’ve formatted them differently. The month now uses a three-letter format, rather than a number. We’ve created a standard way of describing a date, or a data standard.
Not all data standards are as straightforward as this, but it helps show the kind of alignment that would need to happen across health and social care data.
How did we develop the draft standards?
We’ve developed the draft standards through extensive engagement with the social care sector in Wales.
We worked with professionals across local authorities, regional partnerships and service providers to understand what information is most important to record and share.
This work helped us identify priority areas, known as use cases, where common standards could bring the greatest benefit.
To develop the standards, we established a writing group and invited people from a range of roles across Wales to be a part of it, including:
- practitioners
- managers
- data specialists
- digital professionals.
Working alongside data standards specialists, group members reviewed proposed data items, discussed definitions and agreed the content of the draft standards.
This collaborative approach helps ensure the standards are grounded in practice and shaped by people who understand the sector.
If you’d like to know more about the background to this project, our Head of Strategic Data Programmes Owen Davies has written a blog about the work that’s been done so far.
Why are we asking for feedback?
The writing group has developed the draft standards, but we know that no single group can represent every perspective across social care.
That's why we're inviting the wider sector to review the drafts and tell us what they think.
We want to know:
- are the standards easy to understand?
- do the definitions make sense?
- is there anything missing?
- could any part of the standards be difficult to apply in practice?
- are there any unintended impacts we should consider?
The more perspectives we hear, the more confidence we can have that the standards will meet the needs of the sector.
Who should take part?
We'd like to hear from anyone involved in delivering, managing, analysing or improving social care services.
You don't need specialist technical knowledge to provide feedback. The standards have been developed to support social care practice, so feedback from people working directly in and around the sector is especially valuable.
What happens after the feedback period?
Once the feedback period closes, we'll review all responses and identify common themes, issues and suggestions.
Where changes are needed, feedback will be discussed with the writing group and used to refine the standards.
We'll publish a summary of the feedback received and explain how it has informed the next stage of development.