Social care service provision using spatial-temporal data analytics

There is significant national interest in tackling issues surrounding the needs of vulnerable children and adults. At the same time, UK local authorities face severe financial challenges as a result of decreasing financial settlements and increasing demands from growing urban populations. With an ageing population, local authorities were reported to have spent $168 million more than budgeted in 2015/16 and had struggled to maintain care quality and manage unprecedented demand. This research employs state-of-the-art data analytics and visualisation techniques to analyse six years of local government social care data for the city of Birmingham, the UK's second most populated city. We analyse the management and delivery of social care services by Birmingham City Council, which itself is the largest local authority in Europe, to discover patterns and insights that may assist in the understanding of service demand, support decision making process and the resource allocation management. In a data-led study, using data derived from personal social care records and obtaining knowledge of what drives the demand for services, we strive to use data as the cornerstone to evidence-based planning delivery. This research intends to: (i) demonstrate how data analytic tools can be applied to the administrative data held by the local government to help identify service cost profiles, provisioning and its geographical dimensions; (ii) connect the data with business plan budget documents to gain better impact over specific groups of vulnerable service users and consider how this analysis can support service planning changes; and (iii) validate and highlight the decision-making processes, complexity, and continuity of data records within the system - from referral through the assessment process. The use of data in this manner could also inform the approach a local authority has to its data, its capture and use, and the potential for supporting data-led management, service improvements, and potential resource savings. This data analysis resulted from a two-year study commissioned by Birmingham City Council as part of the `case for change' following several poor Ofsted reports. In response to recent fiscal challenges, the Council is expected to make savings of $815 million over the nine-year period 2011/12 to 2019/20. Delivering savings of this scale, whilst protecting and safeguarding the most vulnerable citizens within a growing urban population, is one of the biggest challenges facing the local authority.