Appendix A: Policy Context

As a sector, we need to understand more about how services and support are affecting the outcomes in people’s lives. Key to supporting implementation of the Act is the need for outcome-focused intelligence.

The ASCS exists in a national policy context which strives for greater focus upon personalisation in health and social care. The Care Act 2014 consolidates past legislation and regulation but continues to strive for greater personalisation along with improved transparency and accountability.

‘Personalisation’ means putting the service user at the heart of care planning and provision and it is critical to have high quality information to aid our understanding of the impact and outcomes achieved, to enable choice and inform services development and improvement. A robust survey programme, collecting the views of the people who use services and support, is the best and most appropriate vehicle to achieve this.

The Personal Social Service Adult Social Care Survey (ASCS) is the most significant pool of personal outcome information for those receiving council-funded or managed adult social care. It is an important resource in supporting development and improvement of local services and enabling people to make better choices about their care. It features heavily in the Adult Social Care Outcomes Framework (ASCOF), populating the measures listed in Appendix B.

It is important to be able to see at national level how well services are meeting service user needs. However, data from the survey is not intended to be used solely to monitor performance through national outcome measures but also to be used locally to inform delivery of service and support and to monitor and develop standards. Whilst some councils may undertake regular feedback via their agreements with service providers this survey gives a different insight into outcome for users and provide a consistent basis for comparing results across different areas. Recent feedback from councils has confirmed that NHS England user and carer surveys have played an important role in monitoring and improving local service provision.

The ASCS provides assured, benchmarked local data on outcomes to support local services to think about ways of improving outcomes in a very challenging financial climate. It is constructed so that an individual outcome can be disaggregated into constituent groups. So, as well as providing an overall quality of life index, it provides intelligence on the outcomes experienced by specific groups, the extent to which services and support meet all outcome needs, and the value-added by social care services.