Last Updated on March 26, 2019
Skills for Care is looking for employers to take part in a working group to influence development of a digital self-assessment tool. The tool will help adult social care providers measure to assess how prepared they are to move towards more digital services.
The new service will support adult social care employers with emerging and existing technology and data protection responsibilities. The project will run until March 2021 and is funded by NHS Digital.
As part of this, Skills for Care is creating the digital self-assessment tool so that social care employers can see how capable their organisation’s staff and infrastructure are in terms of using digital tools and skills to deliver accessible, cost-effective, efficient and person-centred services.
The tool will help employers understand areas they need to work on, for example, skills, technology or strategy, so that they are able to work in a more digital way.
Skills for Care is looking to work with small to medium sized social care employers to ensure the tool is as useful as possible. These employers will help to develop the tool, and the group will run from late-March to November 2019.
Employers will be asked to get involved in:
- One face-to-face workshop in April in London (travel expenses for one person to attend from each organisation will be paid for).
- Two one-hour webinars (you will need access to the internet and a phone).
- Two to three online surveys, where employers will be required to provide feedback on content/design.
- Allowing researchers to observe completion of the tool by one of your colleagues in your workplace (not all employers will be required to volunteer for this).
You can apply to join the working group to help develop the digital self-assessment tool if you are an:
- Owner.
- Nominated individual.
- Registered manager.
- Member of the board or senior management team.
- Individual with responsibility for IT.
- Individual with responsibility for quality assurance.
- Individual with responsibility for data protection (including data protection officers or Caldicott Guardians).
Complete the form on the Skills for Care website by 31st March 2019 to register your interest.
Before embarking upon this ‘digital self-assessment tool’ journey, all concerned should remember that a vast proportion of the area of the UK has either no broadband or a broadband service of only 1.5Mb-2Mb line-speed at best. Also those with better broadband speeds frequently suffer outages/downtime events that, combined with modern cloud-based software that has no caching facility, render ‘digital’ being a greatest time-wasting happening than almost anything ever before it.