Background on the National Minimum Data Set (NMDS):
As part of the Sector Skills Council the Skills for Care has responsibility for developing strategy and good practice in Adult Social Care in England. Working with those involved with providing services in this area and the users of those services, they aim to modernise Adult Social Care in England.
To do this they need to ensure qualifications and standards of those working in the provision of the services continually adapt to meet the changing needs of people who use care services.
By developing National Standards and a Qualification Framework for the care sector and collecting skills data and researching issues affecting carers and people who use care services, they hope to meet the needs of the people who use the care services by providing a highly qualified and effective workforce across the care sector.
Regional Skills for Care committees contribute to the improvement of Social Care and Social Work through Workforce Development within their particular region of the Country. Building employer-led regional support networks to liaise with Health, Local Government and Education at Local, Regional and National level. This body of people together are working on creating a National Workforce Development Strategy for the sector to enable continual development of Adult Social Care in England.
Data Collected for Analysis:
The NMDS-SC Questionnaire is designed to gather information about providers of Social Care and whether they conduct their business as part of the Statutory, Voluntary or Private Sector.
The Questionnaire is separated into a number of sections to assist you in completing the necessary information. Once you have completed the questionnaire and returned it to Skills for Care you will only need to update your details if they change in the future. The NMDS-SC is a workforce tool that will streamline the collection of robust information for the Social Care Sector.
For Employers and key stakeholders in the sector the benefits of the NMDS-SC are numerous. The NMDS-SC will:
- Benchmark your Services with other Organisations in your Locality or Region.
- Identify Staff Skills, Needs and Achievements.
- Enable you to create a Staff Development and Training Plan that meets the needs of the Organisation and which reflects the National Minimum Standards.
- Plan Effectively for your Current and Future Social Care Workforce.
- Enable Personal Development Planning for Individual Staff.
- Identify Recruitment and Retention Issues and enable you to Develop Succession-planning Strategies.
- Enable you to Develop Staff Skills and Competence in line with Regulation and good Social Care Practice.
- Identify Skill Shortages.
- Provide Information for Skills for Care to represent the Social Care Sector and to attract resources to support the Social Care Skills Agenda.
- Enable your Organisation to be recognised by the different Strategic and Funding Agencies in your Region when they consider the economic and educational support available in your locality.
The SDMS System can accommodate all the data specified in the National Minimum Data Set for Social Care and allows the user to produce the Organisational Questionnaire to be sent to the Skills for Care for evaluation.
Staff Development for Windows with SDMS V National Minimum Data Set Module:
From the very first release, SDMS V Staff Development the Software has not only addressed the Central Training Administration Needs of users but also addressed the related Workforce Management Issues - such as the production of Staffing Return SSDS0001 and other Work Force Data issues such as those defined by LGMB Workforce Analysis requirements in the early 1990s.
With the latest release, these features have been completely revised, extended and updated, not only to meet the increasing needs of Workforce Planning within Social Services and its link to training, but also to address the need for Training and Workforce Managers to gather and produce the data required for the National Minimum Data Set of Skills for Care.
The latest release will enable departments to gather NMDS-SC data in the course of Managing Training and Staff and therefore will contribute to making sure that the tools provided by Skills for Care - paper questionnaires, Excel™ Workbooks and now a Web Application - are used to best effect.
The upgrade will assist users to extract the data required for the NMDS-SC from their local data and is an important tool for doing this.
National Minimum Data Set for Social Care will give us a complete picture of the Social Care Workforce. This vital information will help to plan for future Training, Qualifications, Funding and Policies to develop the Social Care Workforce.
This release of SDMS V Staff Development for Social Services Edition has been the result of several years development - responding to and working with the request and perhaps demands of key Social Services Clients.
The new release includes:
- Significant Additional Data Items and Features on Employees and Staff
- Major Extension of the Posts and Jobs Management of the Software
- Additional Reporting based on the Extended Data Items of Employees and Jobs
- A fully Revised User Definable Workforce Module to address - amongst other things - the National Minimum Data Set
- Extension of the Scope of the System to Hold Data for Partner Organisations not just the Departments own details and Staff
- Substantially Expanded to Include Several Additional Features for the Management and Analysis of Staff Training and Qualifications - Including Qualifications Framework
- Many General Improvements and Enhancements
Integration Details into SDMS from Additional Sources:
From discussion’s with customer’s we have found that in general the data required by the NMDS is not held in a single place - some details will be in SDMS, some in Corporate Payroll, some on spreadsheets and some will need to be gathered directly from Staff themselves. To help Departments assemble this data has a range of Integration Services to migrate this data to SDMS as a "data portal" for the NMDS.
This process will have specific requirements based on the format of the files currently holding the data and thus will be done as bespoke work. This will involve technical implementation meetings, between your organisation and SDMS, designed to ensure the data will be brought in as accurately and efficiently as possible.
Where some or all of the data required for the NMDS-SC is not available in any form in the organisation, it may be necessary to begin collection of the data. Methods to aquire this data will be discussed and agreed between SDMS and your organisation to ensure a structured approach to data collection is used. This may be done, for example, by sending a spreadsheet document to each member of staff, asking them to enter their details. Specific fields will be required to identify the person completing the spreadsheet, etc. All sources of data can then be brought together to be imported into the SDMS data where it can be validated and exported to the format required by the NMDS-SC.
Customer Experiences - Case 1
As a user of the SDMS application for over 16 years this Social Services Department had been collecting staffing details since the initial implementation of SDMS. Although the customer had also purchased a repeating import as part of the implementation process they had stopped using this tool when the HR Department changing their supplier of Payroll software. During this stage the collection and accuracy of the staffing details had meant a large number of duplicate records had been created due to the manual process that the staff followed to create new training records.
As the customer identified the process of producing the information for the National Minimum Data Set a key target for the Department they looked into working closely with SDMS to find the best solution to rectify this issue.
During discussions with SDMS to try and identify the best source of Post and Post Assignment information it became obvious that since the change over Payroll Systems that the organisation didn’t seem to hold the relevant historic details of when staff started in their current jobs in Electronic format.
The customer is currently going through the final stages of Data Cleansing to remove the duplicate records and have enabled the correct information to be transferred from the HR System following a restructuring of job roles in the coming months.
Customer Experiences – Case 2
This customer had been using the SDMS Staff Development for Windows application for over 8 years and they had a built a good record of recent employee qualifications as well as training courses and work roles and locations. As a standard part of their implementation they had purchased an integration module to import data from the corporate payroll system on a monthly basis.
Following an audit of how to produce they would need to produce the yearly NMDS return, it was decided to use SDMS as the “NMDS portal" since it offered the specific NMDS and Qualifications Framework modules.
Discussions were held between the two parties to help identify whether they held any of the information required for the return. It was identified that some of the information was available within the Personnel application and some of the details were held in a copy of the SSDS001 staffing return from a previous year submission. It was also decided that some of the information required didn’t need to be held within SDMS as it wasn’t particularly relevant for the Training Department. To help with this; SDMS offered a utility which would allow the information to be transferred into SDMS, then once the upload process was completed the information could be removed from SDMS by running a Batch Update Utility.
The user is now in a position to run the Bulk Upload programme within SDMS to upload their NMDS to the Skills for Care website.
