Adult Social Care Glossary, v 0.6

Events that occur within the reporting period should be recorded for service users and carers. This includes:

• Requests for support completed during the reporting period. This is the point at which the initial contact outcome has been finalised.
• Assessments and reviews completed during the reporting period. Open or ongoing requests, assessments or reviews should not be included. Assessments started before the reporting period start date and completed during the reporting period should be included.
• Services that are active during the reporting period. This includes services that are active at the end of the reporting period, as well as those that started or ended during the reporting period. Service events are the only event type in CLD that can be open and ongoing with an event start date but no event end date.

Cancelled events should be excluded from the collection. For CLD submissions, a cancelled event is an event where the process was not completed. Events that were erroneously recorded but didn’t happen are considered cancelled. Requests, assessments and reviews should be considered cancelled where they are halted prior to completion for an unexpected reason such as an admission to hospital. A service should only be considered cancelled if it is terminated prior to any support being provided. Suspended services should be included as ongoing until the service is confirmed as being no longer provided.

These events represent four key steps in the social care pathway.

We recognise that different local authorities operate different front-door services and commission services in different ways. We also recognise that terminology, IT case management systems and recording practices vary. The guiding principle when mapping events to one of the four event types (detailed in the Event Type section below) is that it should most closely match the activity. Local authority data leads should use their professional judgement to decide this, alongside the guidance. Annex C sets out the rationale for how local authorities should record events if they operate the ‘three conversations’ model or similar strengths-based approaches.

We also recognise that individuals may have multiple care needs involving multiple referrals to different services and interrupted by unplanned events, such as a hospital admission. In these situations, selecting a single Event Outcome for reporting purposes is not straightforward. Guidance on this is given under the Event Outcome field with worked examples provided in Annex D.

For carer services, local authorities have a range of arrangements with third party organisations to provide assessments and services. In some instances, the local authority funded sector partners will be able to provide records containing the relevant details of carers they assess and support. Subject to appropriate data sharing agreements, these can be used to submit carers information within CLD. In other instances, the funding may be more general (block grant funded) and the local authority would have no expectation that the funded sector partner could provide carer records. In such cases, we would not expect an authority to submit records for this group. At the time of submission, the comments box on the Data Landing Portal (DLP) should be used to describe this context.