Social care provides practical support and personal care to people who need help to live independently and with dignity. In England, it is a large and complex sector spanning care homes, at-home care and other services, with around 1.7 million posts across the sector. Despite recent improvements, recruitment and retention remain significant challenges, making reliable workforce intelligence crucial for planning and policymaking.
In this hackathon, Skills for Care, the organisation responsible for workforce intelligence and development across adult social care in England, will challenge LIV.INNO PhD students to tackle the research question:
How can we accurately measure and report social care vacancies to government, both reliably and in a timely way?
The underlying data comes from organisations across the sector reporting their staffing levels and vacancies through the Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS), one of the leading sources of workforce intelligence in England. The challenge is to turn imperfect, self-reported and constantly changing data into a reliable picture of the workforce
Teams will have access to Skills for Care data and, rather than being given a predefined methodology, will be asked to formulate and investigate their own approaches. Whether through statistical modelling, machine learning, uncertainty estimation, anomaly detection, data quality methods or something entirely unexpected, the aim is to develop novel ways of extracting trustworthy intelligence from complex real-world data.
This is an opportunity to work on a genuine research problem where methodological innovation could have practical and lasting consequences for how one of the UK's most important public services is understood and planned.