Digital social care

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. You can read about our annual return findings from 2022-2023.

There has been a rise in digital leads - specialists who champion the use of technology to improve care, empower staff, and enhance outcomes for people who use services. See our annual return findings for 2024.

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.  

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.

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.  

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.