OpenCare: New and improved

OpenCare is a dashboard that allows you to compare care services across Scotland with little effort

Currently in Scotland there is no easy way to compare individual care services against their peers - this means if you’re exploring care options for someone you love or you’re a curious care manager who wants to know how your service measures up, your only option is to trawl through archives of messy files. This is why I created the OpenCare dashboard which was the very first interactive public dashboard to compare care services across Scotland using public data from the Care Inspectorate.

It’s been a busy stint working on a new version of OpenCare which was previously a tediously slow, primitive dashboard that was out of date the moment it went online. The new and improved version is a fast (still primitive) dashboard that contains the latest care service information to allow you to compare care across Scotland. As far as I know it’s the first of its kind and purely uses open data, summarising it in a different way that allows us to compare any given service to similar one instead of manually combing through a jumble of excel sheets.

This is by no means a finished product but is just a step towards providing clear, easy to use tools using open data that allow you to make more informed decisions (or to just be nosy). Let me know if you find it useful or if there is anything that would make it more so!

The bit no one cares about

This new improved version was built using Quarto and Observable JavaScript using Aquero and Plot libraries for data wrangling and visualisation. Who cares? Well this re-model was inspired by a series by Melissa Van Bussel, which highlighted how we can create self-hosted interactive dashboards without the usual limits of Shiny ‘active hours’. It also means that the dashboard is server-less and everything is handled on the client-side which means updates happen instantly and a much smoother user-experience.

I also managed to set up Github Actions to check for new data available in the public domain, pull it off the web an integrate it into the dashboard. This means we’re always seeing the latest data available as soon as it’s available.

Disclaimer

This dashboard is not affiliated with or supported by the Care Inspectorate. It contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Data source