Less abstract, more actionable: why place now sits at the heart of our social care data catalogue

This blog from the Catalogue of Social Care Data (CASCID) team explores how a new place-based approach is helping turn social care data into practical insights for local decision-making. It highlights why understanding communities and local context is essential to tackling inequalities, planning services and improving outcomes for people who draw on care and support.

Data is only as useful as the questions it helps answer. In social care, many of those questions are rooted in place: what’s happening in my local authority, how does our region compare, and where are the gaps? Through conversations with people working with social care data, it became clear our Catalogue of Social Care Data (CASCID) needed to change. Finding and using data by place wasn’t easy enough. So we’ve reshaped it. Our aim is simple: to make social care data feel less broad and abstract, and more local, practical, and ready to act on. 

Our work sits within a National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) School for Social Care Research (SSCR)‑funded project to enhance our existing catalogue. The original version helped some users find high‑quality datasets, but it wasn’t reaching the breadth of people we wanted to support. We set out to change that by listening to stakeholders. 

We gathered feedback through onsite forms, spoke with our public and stakeholder advisory groups, ran advisory user‑testing sessions, and listened at conferences across social care and the wider data community. One message came through clearly: geography matters. While our catalogue already was seen as valuable, providing sometimes under‑used sources especially longitudinal studies that follow people’s lives over time, users struggled to act on those opportunities if they couldn’t quickly tell where the data applied. If a dataset can’t be filtered by country, region, or local authority, it sometimes remains an interesting idea rather than a decision‑ready resource. 

So, we went to work, searching back through all 54 datasets currently included in CASCID and identified, as precisely as possible, the geographies covered e.g. country, region and local authority, and whether variables exist to support analysis at those levels, e.g. we documented whether study data can be disaggregated to regional or local authority level. The reason may be that disaggregation would mean a risk that individuals could be identified. In others, it meant being transparent that such detail isn’t available. Either way, our goal is clarity at the moment users need it. 

Why does this matter so much? Because the kinds of datasets we include in CASCID can be extraordinarily rich. Think about a carer, a person drawing on care, or someone living in a care home taking part in a longitudinal study: they typically might spend an hour or more completing a survey, not once, but multiple times across several years. The result is nuanced, person‑centred data about everyday life, work, health, caring relationships, and service use. When those data are linked to a clear sense of place, they can inform local strategies, illuminate inequities, and highlight what’s working on the ground. 

Crucially, these sources complement, rather than duplicate, routine administrative data that local authorities and care organisations already collect and rely upon. Routine data are indispensable, but studies and surveys can reveal experiences, outcomes and trajectories that might not show up in service records. By anchoring those insights in geography, we hope to make it far easier to bring the two strands together in practice. 

Alongside the geographic enhancements, we’ve improved how the catalogue communicates some other practical details that stakeholders told us matter for real‑world use. Each dataset entry now makes it easier to see immediately whether access is open, available on application, or restricted and whether the data are available at the individual level, aggregate level, or both. 

What does this unlock? For local and national policymakers, it means you can start with a place‑based question and readily find datasets that can (hopefully) answer it, not only in general terms, but for your population.  

We’re not stopping here. With our remaining funding, we’ll be trying to highlight measures that better capture the experiences of people with marginalised characteristics and offering clearer guidance on when and how datasets can be linked to deepen analysis. We’re also continuing to close geographic gaps and updating our measures as producers update their documentation and data releases. 

As social care leaders, we’d love you and your teams to try the updated catalogue. Start with your locality, explore what’s available at the level you need, and see how longitudinal and other research datasets can complement the routine information you might already use. And please keep telling us what would make the catalogue better. Your feedback is how we turn our catalogue into a genuinely useful part of the UK’s social care data infrastructure.