We’ve given the National Social Care Data Portal for Wales a big update and a new look.
Here, Claire Miller, our Data Portal Lead, outlines some of the changes we’ve made to help users of the portal to better understand social care data in Wales.
What is the data portal?
The data portal is a one-stop shop for social care data in Wales.
It includes data about social care itself and some of the things that might impact on demand and need, like health, deprivation and the population.
We get the data from a variety of sources. A lot of the data on social care comes from collections carried out by Welsh Government, such as the Children Receiving Care and Support Census. Other data comes from the Office for National Statistics, Public Health Wales, and local authorities. The portal also includes our own registrations data.
We’ve worked with a company called Grant Thornton to build a new platform and then further improve how people access and use the data on the portal.
The latest version replaces the old portal and our Population Projections Platform (also known as Daffodil).
What’s new?
Most obviously, the portal has a new look. We’ve changed the theme colours to fit more closely with our new Insight Collective website.
The Insight Collective is our research, data, innovation and improvement service which aims to support those working or interested in social care to make a positive difference.
The portal is a tool that can help with this by giving people access and insight into social care data. It makes sense for the two sites to look and feel more similar.
We’ve also added:
Datasets
One of the things users told us would help them was the ability to look at more than one ‘indicator’ at a time.
Indicators are individual data items, like the number of adults receiving assessments for care and support.
Data on the portal used to only be available as individual indicators. For example, if you were looking at looked after children by age group, you could only view data and visualisations for one age band at a time.
The new datasets give you more flexibility to choose the information you want to display in your tables and visualisations.
Visualisations
Once you’ve selected a dataset or indicator to explore, you’ll see that we’ve also updated the visualisations on the portal.
As well as being able to view several measures on the same graph, there are also more types of graph to explore.
- Compare indicators – this puts all the measures you’ve chosen on one bar chart so you can see how they compare. You can add geographies to see how numbers compare between different places.
- Compare areas – this shows a bar chart of the selected measures for each chosen geography so you can see how the breakdowns for each area differ.
- Compare time periods – while this might look like the compare indicators option, if you add additional time periods, you’ll be able to see how the measures compare across different periods.
- Compare indicators by year – this shows a bar chart of the selected measures for each chosen time period so you can see how the breakdowns for each compare.
- Percentage change between years – this graph quickly shows the percentage change in numbers between two time periods.
- Proportional – this is a stacked bar chart that shows how the measures included break down as a proportion of the whole, while comparing all the geographies at the same time.
- Change over time – this is a line chart that shows how each of the selected measures have changed over time for one geography at a time.
- Compare areas over time – this visualisation lets you compare a single indicator over time but for several different geographies.
- Map – this shows you the measures mapped across Wales, which is useful for quickly seeing which areas have highest and lowest values.
- Table – this will show you the data in a table. This is also where you can download data.
While all of the visualisations are available for all of the datasets, not all will provide useful insights in each case.
For example, a map of raw numbers will mostly show you where lots of people live (so areas like Cardiff and Swansea are likely to be highest). Using maps with percentages or rates will probably be more helpful in examples like this.
Data summaries
We’ve also added data summaries to the portal.
These will highlight trends in datasets, give them more context, or make links between the data and research.
One of the things people have told us is that they want to be able to understand more about the data being collected about social care.
The data summaries which are already available on the portal are:
We plan to continue adding data summaries on a variety of topics on a regular basis to help people get a better insight into the data on the portal.
Visit the data portal
Visit the data portal today to start using all of the new features.
Get in touch
If you have any feedback or questions, or you’d like to suggest a topic for a data summary, please e-mail data@socialcare.wales.
