History
The Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS) is an online data collection service that covers the adult social care workforce in England. It was previously known as the National Minimum Data Set for Social Care (NMDS-SC) prior to the ASC-WDS service becoming live in August 2019.
The ASC-WDS is managed by Skills for Care (SfC) on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and has been collecting information about social care providers and their staff since early 2006. A list of ASC-WDS data items can be found at https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/adult-social-care-workforce-data/adult-social-care-workforce-data.aspx
Before 2011 the data source used for this publication was the ‘Personal Social Services Staff of Social Services Departments’ return (SSDS001). Following an open National Statistics consultation it was decided that the NMDS-SC would replace the SSDS001 from September 2011 as the adult workforce data return for local authorities. In August 2019 the NMDS-SC changed to become the ASC-WDS. The data in this publication is not directly comparable with SSDS001, and so comparisons are not made to local authority data prior to 2011 in this publication – for more information regarding this please see the data quality section. This publication presents key findings only. Detailed local authority level data is available in the accompanying reference data tables and CSV files.
All totals used in this publication are rounded to the nearest 100, except for figures relating to gender, ethnicity and age which have been rounded to the nearest 5. This is to allow for ease of reading.
ASC-WDS data is split into two data sources (establishment or team, and individual worker level). A confirmations spreadsheet is also collected, and some variation in total jobs can be expected between these. Please see the data quality section for more information on the source and quality of these data sources.
