What next for the Social Care Wales Data Portal?

What is the data portal?

The portal is a one-stop shop for social care data in Wales.

For example, that includes data on children using care and support, adults accessing social care, and the costs of providing services.

The portal also contains data about things that might impact on demand and need, like health, deprivation, and population figures.

We get the data from a variety of sources. Much 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.

Where are we now?

The Social Care Wales Data Portal replaces two previous portals - the National Social Care Data Portal for Wales and the Social Care Wales Population Projections Platform (also known as Daffodil). We’ve added the data from these platforms to the new portal, so users of those previous sites can still access it.

The data in the portal is organised around themes, such as children and young people or adults.

Our aim is to make relevant data easy to find by searching or browsing. There’s also an option to go straight to projections data if that’s what you’re looking for.

Individual data items, or ‘indicators’, like the number of adults receiving assessments for care and support, each have their own page.

When you look at an indicator, there’s extra information to provide insight into the data. For most, you can see the data broken down by local authority.

There are also visualisations like maps, line graphs and column charts. You can change what’s displayed on the visualisations by varying the time period or the areas included. You can also download the data from these.

What are the plans for the future?

The current portal is just the first step. We have plans to improve and expand it to make it a more useful resource for those interested in social care in Wales.

Updated data

The first thing we’re doing is updating the data on the portal.

Currently, some of the data is out of date or missing. We’re working to add new and updated Welsh Government figures, with other datasets to follow.

That means you’ll be able to access all of the data from the new Performance and Improvement Framework, as well as updated versions of the indicators that are already on the site.

As part of this, we plan to add data that’s broken down by local health board as well as local authority.

To help make the data easier to understand, we’re making sure each indicator has a clear explanation of what it is and how it was collected.

We’re also adding new data from our registrations database. That means you’ll be able to explore how many people are in the registered workforce and the types of jobs they’re doing.

Visualisations

Data on the portal is currently available as individual indicators, but we plan to make it easier to view groups of indicators. For example, in the future you could potentially explore graphs that show a breakdown by age or gender in one place. This is something users have asked for.

We’ll also make the visualisations for single indicators clearer and more helpful.

Our other plans include adding the option to use visualisations like scattergraphs to analyse the relationships between different indicators.

Explaining the data

We’ll produce more insights into the data to help people better understand and use it.

One way we’ll do this is through articles. These will highlight trends in datasets, give them more context, or make links between the data and research. You’ll be able to find these through the portal and they’ll be split into the same categories as the relevant data, making them easier to explore.

We’re also working on data models. These take available data and use it to forecast future trends or look at the potential impact of different policies. The first one we’re working on is what might impact future numbers of looked-after children. We hope to share this through the portal in the future.

If you have any thoughts, feedback, or questions about the data portal, please e-mail data@socialcare.wales