Adult social care and COVID-19: Assessing the impact on social care users and staff in England so far Our analysis on the scale of the impact of COVID-19 on social care in England during the first phase of the pandemic

In this briefing we provide an overview of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on social care in England. In part 1 we describe how the pandemic unfolded in the social care sector from March until June 2020, and in part 2 we examine the factors that contributed to the scale and severity of outbreaks in care homes. In part 3 we attempt to quantify the disruption to health and social care access from February until the end of April 2020.

We use a mixture of national data sources from England, individual level data from the health care service, and publicly available data reported by Public Health England, Care Quality Commission and Office for National Statistics. We carried out novel descriptive analysis, with all code available and further description of the methods set out in the technical appendix to this briefing.

Our analysis demonstrates the scale of the challenge of keeping people who need social care safe and in providing high-quality health and social care during the pandemic. Long-standing structural issues have exacerbated the crisis in social care and hindered the response to the pandemic. Action is needed now to prevent further harm including by filling the gaps in data, particularly for those receiving domiciliary care, highlighted by our analysis. A new data strategy is needed for social care that first and foremost enables the provision of better care.