The National Minimum Data Set for Social Care or NMDS-SC has been introduced to enable those involved in the running of the Social Care sector to more effectively plan the provision of care. It allows individual employers to better understand their own employees and provides those commissioning care with a better understanding as to the capacity of care available to them. As it will also provide necessary information to those providing funding within the Social Care sector, it will mean that failing to complete and submit the NMDS will result in a withdrawal of any funding for training that care businesses may receive. Submission of the information will require the collation of the necessary data and for it to be then electronically submitted to Skills for Care.

CareFree has developed a NMDS bolt on feature that can be switched on at an additional cost. This will enable to storage and easy reporting of the necessary information required for the NMDS. Within the most recent version of CareFree several additional fields have been added to the Client and Carer screens to further collect data that is important for the NMDS submission. Even for those who haven’t had the NMDS bolt on feature switched on yet these have provided additional valuable information regarding their staff and clients

CareFree uses a coding process to ensure that the information recorded against Carers or Clients can be correctly exported and submitted to the National Minimum Data Set website. What this process allows if you to continue to keep using your own descriptive terms for Items that are held in the relevant lists. For example within your organisation you may well give specific job roles to members of staff that do not tie up with the NMDS Job Titles. You can still use your own choice of Job Title by entering it into the list contained in Roles on the Items Screen

Using the NMDS Spreadsheet can allow you to find the Job Title that provides the closest match to the one you are using and then simply apply the corresponding code in the field on the Items Screen. To the right of the page you will see the code list for the Job Title that you have given your member of staff. It is worth noting that as the NMDS covers a wide range of areas of Health and Social Care there will be Job Titles that may not be relevant to your specific business.

There are a number of fields on the Carer Screen that record information for the NMDS. On the Other Details Tab fields now record the reason for an employee’s departure as well as their destination

The Payroll Tab now also records information regarding Induction Training and length of time in the industry as well as the Job Role which as mentioned above feeds through to the NMDS report as well.

Within the Client Screen Other Details Tab there are further fields that can record data regarding your service provision.

As with the Carer screen all of the available Items can be coded in the Items Screen to ensure that they feed into the correct areas of the National Minimum Data Set report.

Once the feature has been switched on and you have coded all of the items within the Items Screen, the hard work is done.

The next step involves making sure that the background information for the NMDS export is set up correctly ready to export the data in the correct form.

The NMDS Options Screen can be found via the Tools menu and Options and Settings.

The first of the two screens allows you to set up the information that would identify your business when the report is sent. The second identifies the services you provide.

Once set up these now allow you to use the NMDS export feature which is found in the File Menu. It will ask you for a location to save the export file in. It is important to save this in a location that you can find again easily