The Datamonger
Etazo Performance Data's newsletter
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Dear <<First Name>>
We're looking at a range of publications this month, from the impact of Brexit on fostering to what the users of adult social care tell us about their quality of life.
We have been busy in the last few months, working on end of year returns for one authority, adult social care for another and continuing to support Members in a third authority. We are always interested in discussing new projects, though, so do get in touch if you would like to discuss data and performance support. We specialise in reviewing what you collect and how you use it, in order to help you improve performance frameworks; in deep dive analyses of your area's services and level of need in specific areas such as children going missing; and in completing statistical returns.
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Best wishes
Jo and Georgia
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In this issue
~ Data publications
~ Local area performance metrics :
Assessing the flow of patients
across the boundary between the
NHS and social care
~ Adults Social Care Survey
England 2017 to 2018
~ Children in Need data
~ Barnardo's fostering services
~ EU nationals: foster carers and
children
~ Useful links
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Local area performance metrics : Assessing the flow of patients across the boundary between the NHS and social care
Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government and Department of Health and Social Care, 4 September 2018
www.gov.uk
This statistical publication brings together 6 indicators to explore local authority performance on supporting older people leaving hospital. The 6 measures have already been published in other releases, but this is an attempt to summarise LA level performance by weighting measures.
The individual measures are:
- Emergency Admissions for older people as a population rate;
- the length of very long stays in hospital following emergency admission of older people (technically, the 90th percentile of length of stay, or the duration of stay for the 10% of people who spent the longest time in hospital);
- delayed transfers of care as a population rate;
- the proportion of older people leaving hospital who received re-ablement / rehab support;
- the proportion of those who were still at him 3 months after leaving hospital;
- and the proportion of discharges taking place at the weekend where people had been admitted as an emergency.
Some of the measures are 2017/18 data and others 2016/17.
Grouping these measures together and weighting them produces a broad brush picture of how effectively services work together to support older people. The report presents LAs ranked from least good to most good using this weighted measure. We think that in most cases LAs will know their data well and be unsurprised by the ranking they have received; they will also have access to more recent data for some measures, so will be able to re-calculate the weighted measure and look at progress.
It is perhaps surprising that there appears to be no clear relationship between the proportion of older people receiving rehab care and the proportion of that group who are able to live independently for longer. Rehab care ranges from 0.6% of emergency admissions to 9.4%, and LAs providing rehab care to a higher proportion of people tend to be in the least good group on the overall weighted metric. The proportion of these people still at home 3 months after leaving hospital varies from 62% to 97%, and again, surprisingly, LAs with better performance on the success of rehab care tend to be in the least good group for the overall weighted metric. So not only is there no link between the proportion of people receiving rehab and how successful it is, but LAs may perform well on rehab but still overall poorly when the rate of emergency admissions and of delayed transfers of care are taken into account.
If you are interested in exploring your area's performance on this key NHS / social care interface measure further, please contact us.
Personal Social Services Adult Social Care Survey, England - 2017-18
NHS Digital, 2 October 2018
digital.nhs.uk
This report summarises the results of the annual survey of users of adult social care. We were interested in the answers to the question about quality of life.
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| Very Good / could not be better |
31% |
| Good |
32% |
| All right |
28% |
| Bad |
6% |
| Terrible / could not be worse |
3% |
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Men were generally more satisfied than women, and people with a religious faith were slightly more satisfied. People in residential care (excluding nursing) were strikingly more satisfied:
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Very
Good |
Good |
All Right |
Bad |
Terrible |
| Community |
27% |
32% |
30% |
7% |
4% |
| Residential Care |
43% |
32% |
20% |
3% |
1% |
We wondered if there was a link between how service users feel and the amount of sickness absence staff take. We matched the data against staff absence, as reported in Personal Social Services: Staff of Social Services Departments, England 2017 and cannot see a correlation between how services users feel about their quality of life and the absence taken by social work staff – which suggests that quality of life is too complex to be affected in a simplistic way by staff absence or factors linked to staff absence.
If you are interested in exploring how you can use the service user survey results, or what it shows alongside other data for your LA, such as social work activity, safeguarding or your workforce profile, please get in touch with us.
Children in Need data
We spend a lot of time combing through the data on children in need. Things that we’ve looked at recently:
The wide range of data on the rate of children waiting for an assessment. For 2017/18 this varies from a modest 2 per 10,000 children in Stockton and Leicester to 147 per 10,000 in Lambeth. The national rate is 22 per 10,000 and the regional rates vary from 12 in the North-East to 51 in Inner London. As a percentage of referrals in the year, the number of children waiting averages 4% nationally and varies between 0% and 24%. We cannot see any clear link between individual LA figures and their inspection judgement, and think that some of the variation is likely to be explained by recording processes or data accuracy issues.
Changes over two years (2016/17 to 2017/18) in factors at assessment. The national picture is very stable, with the biggest change a three percentage point increase in the proportion of referrals where mental health is an issue. The number and proportion of children who had going missing as a factor also increased, by 2,380 children or 0.4 percentage points. Locally, however, there was considerable variation across the two years. For instance, the number and proportion of children in Hull where domestic violence was a factor increased from 616 (25%) in 2016/17 to 2,477 (58%) in 2017/18. Sandwell had a similar increase in factors related to mental health, from 504 children (13%) in 2016/17 to 1,875 (46%) in 2017/18. In some cases this is clearly related to national priorities and focus on specific areas; for instance, although the overall figures on child sexual exploitation have changed very little, some authorities such as Haringey have increased the number of children recorded with CSE as a factor from very low to near the national average. Again, we think that recording and data accuracy are likely to be issues here.
It is useful to compare the Welsh figures on children in need with similar factors. For domestic violence, the reported figures for Wales (2016/17) are significantly lower. For England it was 51% in 2017/18, and the previous year in Wales it was 25%. For children looked after in Wales the prevalence is much higher, at 44%.
We would generally recommend looking at the Welsh data as a helpful addition context to the English data. Not all measures are the same and Welsh LAs monitor a greater level of detail for children in need – for instance, statistics on offending by CiN are published, and this can be broken down by gender.
Local figures on factors at assessment can be extremely useful in prioritising areas for improvement and identifying trends. If you are looking at a specific area – for instance, your LSCB is carrying out a themed audit – we would always recommend seeing what the factor information can add to your areas for investigation or findings.
We have also been looking at the published figures on whether reviews of child protection plans were held on time. This is rather a crude measure as reviews could be a couple of days out of time or months out of time; however, we still think it is worrying that some LAs have reported figures as low as 39% in one LA, and 15 LAs between 70% and 80%, meaning that a fifth or more of children were not reviewed on time. Most of these authorities have judgements of RI or Inadequate (though three are rated Good) – so this measure does seem to be to be related to the quality and timeliness of services generally.
If you are interested in an independent analysis of what your CiN data can tell you about levels of need and services, or in recommendations about how you can use it locally, please let us know.
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Etazo researches
A profile of children referred to Barnardo’s fostering services in England
Barnado's, 2018
www.barnardos.org.uk
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This is an analysis of the characteristics of 630 children referred to Barnado's because they needed a foster placement. For data and policy staff, there are some useful comments about the lack of recording of some information such as whether children have been missing, and on the failure to mention children's trauma. These are clearly a group of children with high needs, and local authorities will want to look at whether they are providing enough information about children's experiences and needs when commissioning placements.
EU nationals: foster carers and fostered children
The Fostering Network, 2018
www.thefosteringnetwork.org.uk
The Fostering Network has carried out a freedom of information request to all local authorities about the number of foster carers and children in foster care who may be directly affected by Britain leaving the European Union. They report that the number of UK citizens who are not British who are foster carers is low, at around 200 people. EU citizens who are not British make up 6% of adults, but only 0.5% of foster carers.
They were unable to establish how many non-UK EU children are in foster care in this country; they report that local authorities appeared to be confused by the question and report unreliable figures.
The Department for Education gets a failing grade on statistics
FullFact, 2018
fullfact.org
FullFact reports that the UK Statistics Authority has written to the DfE five times in twelve months about their use of statistics, and has expressed "serious concerns". The Royal Statistical Society commented that "“For a Department that is in charge of the nation’s numerical skills, this is getting embarrassing".
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Useful links
Statistics about children and music
Not directly related to children's social care! But these figures are a way into considering children's wellbeing and opportunities generally, particularly for deprived children.
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Independent Schools Council annual Census
Not directly related to public sector services, but has some interesting information about numbers of schools and children, including regional variations (there is a informative map on on p5 about the percentage of children in each LA in private schools). The report also includes data on partnership initiatives between private schools and state schools (p23).
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Children's Social Care Data Google Group
We administer the email group for local authorities to discuss children's social care data. Membership is recommended by the DfE and Ofsted as a good resource for performance staff to discuss interpretation of data, definition of indicators and year-end returns, and is of course completely free.
One group member told us that the group has been "a real help" with tips and pointers, such as problems with the DfE website and experiences of inspections. The group member also said, referring to end of year returns, "It’s been reassuring to know that as I plough through 903 errors, others are going through the same process".
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