Work on standards and interoperability in social care to enable better sharing of data across the public sector has been ongoing for years. What that means in real terms is being able to provide better, cheaper services by stopping duplication and securely sharing information in and across public sector organisations such as councils and the NHS. What's important to remember is that IT systems and data are there to support a service, and if services are different, then the schema for data and the IT systems which support the service will be different. Even when there’s specific legislation such as GDPR, local interpretation can be different, and where there isn’t legislation service delivery can vary even more. So the challenge is really how do we influence the interpretation of legislation where it exists and the overall delivery of services, because only then will we really start to solve this problem. Whilst this is often posed as a digital or IT problem, it’s a human is
Local Government, Digital.