Technology enabled care

Nicky Cronin  

Senior Improvement Advisor  

Candice Aitken 

Improvement Advisor 

TEC 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. 

Annual return TEC 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. We aim to publish our findings in the coming months.  

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.  

CYP_inpsection video.mp4 

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 TEC toolkit

We have developed a first draft of a self-evaluation toolkit for the effective use of technology.  This will accompany the recently published TEC good practice guidance. 

We are consulting both internally and externally on the toolkit, and you can get involved here.

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 started in November 2023 with the first service going live in January 2024. The Scottish Government funded 400 licences to further test PainChek in a range of different contexts. The test will include services with different user groups and service types (housing support, care homes - non nursing, local authority, third sector and voluntary). We will report our findings in April 2025.  

We are working in partnership with the Scottish Government, Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre (DHI) and Napier University who are conducting an evaluation of PainChek’s application in Scottish Care services.  

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. 

A range of opportunities are available to develop knowledge, skills, experience and accredited training through the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC), the Open University, NHS Education Scotland (NES), Connecting Scotland, Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) and local or smaller providers.   

Please find below links which you may find useful. 

• NHS Education tools and learning platform TURAS 
• SCVO 
• Digital ethics and inclusion 
• SSSC Stay secure online with 23 Digital Capabilities 
• SSSC 23digital 
• Digital maturity assessment 

For our full list of links and resources please refer to our good practice guide.

We are hosting our first Digital social care webinar on 21 January 2025. We aim to showcase digital social care in practice, share useful resources, and take feedback from care staff about what would help them on their digital journey.