“No specific plans to add social care to the DMA”, says NHSE

NHS England has confirmed that there are no plans to add social care to the Digital Maturity Assessment (DMA) in 2025, despite calls from the sector for its inclusion. 

The DMA is a survey, launched in 2023, to help NHS trusts and integrated care systems in England understand their level of digital maturity by identifying key strengths and gaps in the provision of digital services. 

In May 2024, NHSE confirmed that the 2024 DMA, would be expanded to include primary care, in addition to acute, ambulance, community and mental health settings. 

A source told Digital Health News that there are also plans to add social care to the DMA and the NHSE programme for Digitising Social Care is working with the DMA team “to get the best fit for a version for social care”. 

However, NHSE said told Digital Health News in August 2024 that “currently there are no specific plans to add social care to the DMA in 2025”. 

Chris Wilson, director of integrated care at Access Health, Support and Care, which provides software to the health and care sector, said that the inclusion of social care in the DMA would be “a critical step towards integrating healthcare and social care”. 

“Defining and implementing digital maturity assessments across local government will enable more effective collaboration across the integrated care system, ensuring that health and social care professionals can work together seamlessly to provide comprehensive care,” Wilson said.  

Lee Rickles, trust chief information officer (CIO) and Interweave programme director at Humber Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Yorkshire and Humber Care Record, said that it is “essential” to have a full understanding of digital maturity in social care based on “a consistent and qualitive digital maturity assessment”. 

“The CIO community and social care need to work with NHSE to explain the value and how we can work together to include social care as part of the annual DMA,” he added. 

A digital lead at an integrated care board (ICB) in England, who wished to remain anonymous, told Digital Health News that following the inclusion of primary care in the DMA process, “it’s clear that social care also needs to be included going forward”. 

He added that the delivery of care “can no longer be managed or delivered in silos”. 

“We need to work in true partnership as integrated systems across all partners in order to meet the health and care needs of our population, and the DMA needs to be an important tool working at system level in order to provide the level of intelligence required,” he said.  

A spokesperson for NHSE said that results and insights from the 2024 DMA, sent to ICBs in April 2024, are being validated nationally and briefed regionally to ICBs and providers before being published in the public domain.  

Speaking at Digital Health Summer Schools in July 2024, John Quinn, CIO at NHSE, said that the results of the 2023 DMA had helped secure £3.4 billion investment in NHS digitisation, announced in the Spring budget in March 2024. Quinn added that the DMA needs to be “useful and useable”.