“People receiving care and support commissioned and procured by councils and the NHS cannot see what those service providers have committed to, nor can they participate in holding them to informed account.”

Emma Back, Equal Care Co-op

We’re delighted to announce our work with Equal Care Co-op on the Health Foundation’s Strengthening Social Care Analytics programme. Our project aims to create a shared digital infrastructure for open, accountable and transparent social care.

Our first step will be to find out what people want to know about a specific contract. We’ll be talking with the givers and receivers of care first and foremost, as well as commissioners, social workers and other social care providers. Using what we’ve learnt, we’ll then test and demonstrate the impact that open tendering and open performance has on the quality of care services for those who matter most — the people getting support, their family members, and frontline workers.

We’re really interested in this project because it’s a practical instance of two co-operatives working together to use open data to address power imbalances. It’s a chance for us to understand what data the givers and receivers of support want to be collected, as well as to discuss, analyse and create actionable insights from that data to help the people responsible for developing and providing services. We’ll be using participatory design methods, where power is shifted from those that hold the data to those that need to use it to ask questions — and in turn to create open performance metrics that directly address these stakeholders’ concerns.

It’s a deliberate shift away from the more common model where social care givers and receivers are a passive source of data to which they have no access. We’re aiming to make this area of transparency more effective and accountable, with this project not only acting as an important sectoral pilot for open procurement, but also as evidence that there are better, more inclusive ways to build data standards.

You can find out more about the challenges presented by opaque contracting in social care, and how our work aims to tackle it, in Open tendering and open performance: making care and support accountable to those who give and those who receive care and support.

This project is part of the Health Foundation’s Strengthening Social Care Analytics programme. The Health Foundation is an independent charity committed to bringing about better health and health care for people in the UK.