Skills For Care Award Data Collection Contract

Tribal Group, one of the UK’s leading providers of consultancy and technology services to the public sector has won the contract for the second phase of the Skills for Care initiative which will help modernise adult social care in England.

Skills for Care is the national workforce development body responsible for adult social care. Tribal will work in partnership with Skills for Care to develop a system that will provide a state-of-the-art electronic picture of the industry at the touch of a button. The system will begin to be put in place this autumn and will be completed by winter/spring 2008. Tribal will host, manage and maintain the infrastructure that is essential to the smooth running of the database.

Andrea Rowe, Chief Executive Officer for Skills for Care, says: “NMDS-SC will be of help not only to planners of the future but to employers who will be able to use the system to compare themselves with others in the field of social care. The online information available to users will be anonymous and confidential but it will be invaluable in terms of showing exactly what is happening.”

Jim Chambers, Chief Executive Officer of the Education and Technology Division of Tribal commented: “We are delighted to be part of a project that will change the face of data collection in the social care sector in England. Our task will be both challenging and exciting, and is in one sense, tailor made for our specific skills. Our work in social care, learning and building bespoke IT solutions has given us an excellent grasp of the industry both in this country and internationally, and we are extremely eager to start the task.”

Tribal Group is responsible for other high profile bespoke software projects in the health informatics field including First Episode Response Network (FERN) – an innovative mental health research organisation, and the UK’s Trauma Audit and Research Network (TARN) whose statistics provide a baseline for hospitals to monitor their performance against past results and the performance of other hospitals.