• What is NASCIS?

• How is NASCIS delivered?

• What information is available via NASCIS?

• Who can access NASCIS?

• Why do we have NASCIS?

• What are the benefits of NASCIS?

• Get involved

What is The National Adult Social Care Intelligence Service (NASCIS)?

We have developed NASCIS to provide a single national resource of timely, relevant and useful information for social care services across England.

NASCIS is a collection of data, tools and resources designed to meet the varied needs of service planners, managers, researchers and policy makers amongst many others.

How is NASCIS delivered?

Via the NASCIS website. Via this service, users will have access to a suite of tools, which enable effective and timely analysis of social care data to aid activities such as planning, performance management and service improvement. Specifically:

• our online analytical processing tool: Providing quick, easy and flexible access to a wide range of social care information – enabling you to use an authoritative, common set of data for performance management and benchmarking purposes
• standard reports: Showing the different elements of adult social care data in a range of comparative, thematic and profile reports
• additional tools: Helping you deliver the best service. These include, Projecting Older People Population Information (POPPI); Projecting Adult Needs and Service Information (PANSI); Forecasting Length of Stay and Cost (FLoSC) developed by the Care Service Efficiency Delivery (CSED) programme
• the NASCIS Library: Your intuitive, intelligent search facility that focuses on nearly 200 carefully selected social care and health web resources
• latest key documents: Keeping you up to date with what is emerging in the field of social care

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What information is available via NASCIS?

NASCIS holds data on the primary adult social care collections, providing data going back to 2005/ 2006 for Councils with Adult Social Services Responsibilities (CASSRs).

These collections are:

Referrals, Assessments and Packages of Care (RAP)
A collection of tables that provide information on the number of adults contacting social services and going through the community care assessment process, and the services they receive as a result of that.

Adult Social Care Combined Activity Return (ASC-CAR)
Data on the number of adults in residential and nursing placements funded by councils with adult social services responsibilities. Some of the tables within ASC-CAR were previously collected as part of the SR1 series of tables, which also provides information on residential and nursing care placements.

PSSEX1
The current expenditure on personal social services for adults. The two tables available within NASCIS are the Incl. SSMSS table, which was previously downloaded as Excel spreadsheets under the name Detailed PSS by Councils, and the Unit Costs Summary data.

National Indicator Set (NIS)
The NIS is the only set of indicators on which central government will performance manage local government and covers services delivered by local authorities alone and in partnership with other organisations like health services and the police. The indicators within the tools are on adult social care and mental health, rather than the complete set.

User Experience Survey (UES)
This is the User Experience Survey of older people receiving Home Care in 2008-09. Further UES will be made available in the future Further information on the above can be found in the OLAP tool on the index pages of the various collections, with explanations of what the tables are about and what they contain.

Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA)
PCTs and local authorities are required to produce a Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) of the health and wellbeing of their local community. This is a requirement of The Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007. Key JSNA indicators from the current dataset are provided through NASCIS, covering domains including demography, social and environmental context, lifestyle and risk factors, burden of ill-health and services, to ensure that councils and PCTs don't have to spend the time searching for information to inform their JSNA profiles, as we have done it for them

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Who can access NASCIS?

Anyone can access the NASCIS website, library and analytical tools. The analytical tools are accessed following a simple, automated registration process. Prior to September 2009, access to the tools was restricted. This restriction was necessary as the tools provided access to data submitted by local authorities relating to 2008/09 that had not yet gone through the usual processes of validation required for national statistics.

For 2010, we have instigated a control system to give access to the 2009/2010 activity data so that councils can once again see the raw, unvalidated data while allowing all other users to still access the publicly available data. The 2009/2010 data will be published in September 2010, however if you are a local authority user and require access, please contact us by email to enquiries@ic.nhs.uk or by telephone 0845 300 6016 to start the authentication process.

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Why do we need The National Adult Social Care Intelligence Service (NASCIS)?

Following discussion with the Association of Directors for Adult Social Services (ADASS) in July 2007 we undertook a scoping study. We identified the need for a comprehensive social care intelligence service that could support the complex agenda of social care development and the integration with health services.

Our extensive consultation during 2008 confirmed the need for a service which is more than simply a data warehouse of existing national returns. In order to deliver proper support for the national agenda and deliver business benefits to our customers, we began developing the service.

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What are the benefits of The National Adult Social Care Intelligence Service (NASCIS)?

• increased ease of access to and use of social care information
• improve integrity of information used for local decision making by providing consistent data and indicators
• support local benchmarking and enable users to efficiently map time series analyses and trends against similar local authorities
• improved access to a wider range of timely social care information
• reduced effort/cost of data collection, analysis and dissemination
• a platform for improved integration of health and social care data via inclusion of Joint Strategic Needs Assessment.

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Get involved

Development of NASCIS is incremental, with constant updates to the content and improvement to functionality. Your feedback is vital. Use the service? Tell us what you think via the NASCIS website.

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