Digital social care
With technology taking an increasing important role within social care, the Care Inspectorate has a vital role supporting improvement in this fast-growing area of practice. We do this by working in partnership with a number of sector-based organisations and form part of the Scottish Government’s digital social care programme. Through publication, projects, networking and engagement, we aim to support the generation of knowledge and shared learning in digital social care.
Our workplan is aligned to the Scottish Government’s Digital Health and Social Care strategy and forms part of the national delivery plan Care in the Digital Age: 2024 to 2025.
Our good practice guide: Using technology and digital devices to make a positive impact on health and wellbeing for people experiencing care is now published.
If you would like to get in touch, please contact us at improvementsupport@careinspectorate.gov.scot
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Meet the team
Nicky Cronin
Senior Improvement Advisor
Candice Aitken
Improvement Advisor
Projects
Good practice guide
This document is general good practice guide and applicable to all service types across early learning and childcare, children and young people and adult services. Watch the launch webinar, including presentations from the SSSC and the care sector, below.
Annual return questions analysis
In partnership with the digital social care programme lead, and the Care Inspectorate’s intelligence team, we developed a range of digital technology questions for the Care Inspectorate’s annual return request to all registered services. These responses have been analysed to provide important sector insights on digital social care. See our annual return findings from 2022-2023 here.
Increasing involvement of children and young people in regulated care inspections (using technology)
Aligned to the Care Inspectorate’s Promise workstream 1, the overall aim of this project is to improve how involved and informed children and young people feel in our inspection feedback process. To achieve this, we tested feedback to children and young people post inspection. This involved both face-to-face, video and poster methods of feedback. Here is an example of inspection feedback via video feedback
In recent months, we have presented findings from phase 1 and 2 to a range of internal and external stakeholders. Having taken a quality improvement approach, we are able to evidence improvement through the data measured and gathered from participants. The Care Inspectorate is committed to further testing and upscale of this approach in the children and young people scrutiny team. There has also been interest from scrutiny colleagues in adults, complaints and early learning and childcare inspection teams.
Self-evaluation toolkit
We have developed a first draft of a self-evaluation toolkit for the effective use of technology. This will accompany the recently published good practice guidance.
PainChek
PainChek is an app based solution for the assessment and management of pain. The aim of this project is to test the value of using facial recognition technology and artificial intelligence to assess pain in people who cannot reliably self-report. Funded by the Scottish Governments TEC programme, phase 1 facilitated a small-scale test, producing six months test data from four care homes for older people.
Phase 2 of our pilot project is now complete. We have been disseminating findings and contributing the Napier University's evaluation work. Usage figures are very encouraging, as are outcomes when the technology is used well. Many services lacked the digital foundations, leadership and capacity to engage with the project. However, we worked with services that were extremely committed and provided excellent data to support the project.
In summary:
- 21 care services in Scotland across phases 1 and 2
- No documented pain assessments at baseline
- 9693 assessments using PainChek, 2200 showing pain (22.7%)
- 224 different assessing users.
We also collated the following quality of life measures from four of the five services that completed the full nine month data collection period:
- 40% reduction falls
- 47% increased BMI
- 27% reduced dependency score.
Improving digital social care: Scrutiny and inspection
We are embarking on a phase of engagement with scrutiny inspection teams. We will be consulting inspectors, promoting digital resources and sharing good practice examples. We will also work with methodology to ensure when reviewing the Care Inspectorate’s inspection quality frameworks we increase our focus on the person-centred use of technology to ensure the best outcomes for people.
Professional Development Award (PDA) in Scrutiny and improvement practice (SCQF 10 for SSSC registration)
We plan to provide regular input and engagement on digital social care with inspectors undertaking this qualification. This includes digital for scrutiny activity (virtual inspection elements, digital information exchange etc.) and to develop inspector confidence in digital conversations and evaluating care providers use of technology to support outcomes for people.
Resources
Digital top tips
Events
Digital social care webinar
The webinar recording from 21 January 2025 and slides below.
AI in social care webinar
Explore AI's benefits and challenges to social care. Join us for an insightful digital social care webinar where our speakers will discuss the ethical considerations of AI, outline the Scottish policy context, and hear about real-world applications in Scotland. We have speakers from the Oxford Project, policy leads in Scotland and Magic Notes. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights and help shape the future of AI in social care.
