ASC-WDS - what is it?

...and why you should care?

If you are in the process of choosing a training provider, then there are some changes coming that are worth considering.

Forward thinking training providers might be planning to make your life better in the future.

Put simply, ASC-WDS stands for ‘Adult Social Care - Workforce Data Set’ it is a new way that Skills for Care would like everybody to report on staff progress and it has replaced its predecessor, the NMDS (National Minimum Data Set).

What is ASC-WDS for?

Skills For Care are responsible for improving the skills within the Social Care Sector.

The ‘Workforce Data Set’ is the new way of organising the ‘results of training’ to make it easier to track. If everyone reports in the same way, it makes it simpler to compare numbers and see how we are doing.

There are some reporting features that make ASC-WDS a useful tool, such as the benchmarking tool and the comparisons it facilitates with other providers in your region.

What you can measure, improves.

Share the data - access the funding

To encourage everyone to do this reporting, Skills for Care have set incentives. Skills for Care also manage the funding on behalf of the DHSC.

The WDF (Workforce Development Fund) grant will only be available to Care Providers if this ASC-WDS data is kept up-to-date and complete.

Is ASC-WDS a lot of work?

Over the years, many of our customers have shared with us that ASC-WDS (or NMDS as was) takes too much work to keep up to date, especially if there are multiple systems used to manage the very same data.

How we can help...

We definitely want to make the ASC-WDS reporting easier, so that you can get the WDF funding to take part in our leadership development training, effectively free of charge, essentially you claim £500 for Lead to Succeed or Well Led

Not only that, but it will serve everybody in Social Care if we can collectively help show the progress that is being made.

• Skills for Care can demonstrate the positive impact they are having
• Care Providers get the funding for training - which improves quality and makes the business more successful (Higher CQC Ratings).
• We get to support more people to be the leaders of Social Cares Future!

We are working hard to make the process as simple as pressing a button.

Enter the Matrix

Skills for Care has recently added a matrix so you can also use ASC-WDS to track courses and due dates.  Whilst you can do exactly this in Click via our very own Training Matrix, this is one of the reasons we are working on integrating with ASC-WDS to automate the flow of that data.

So to save everyone the trouble of updating both, as soon as Skills for Care release some features that will enable us to automatically link your data to the ASC-WDS - we will do it.  However, we will not do this without your permission.  We will update you when we know more about Skills for Care’s timelines.  Meanwhile, if this is something you might be interested in, then please let us know.