How we work
Where we look
Every week we monitor what moves across adult social care in the UK. In order of weight: government, regulators and Parliament; councils; research and data; charities; and the people shaping the debate, including what is said on air and in the trade press.
What gets in
We judge every item on who it affects, what it changes, how far it reaches, whether it's new, and who is saying it. Only what clears our bar gets in. Some weeks there's a lot, some weeks less, and we never pad it.
How everything here is made
Our articles, The Care Brief, the care calendar and the tools we build are all human-led and AI-assisted. Care Intelligence from Baton monitors the sources, collects the data and checks claims against their sources. People set the editorial direction, and check and clear everything we publish.
We work hard to get everything right. When we don't, we correct it as soon as we can, openly, and date the correction.
Figures and sources
Every figure we rely on links to its source, with the date we accessed it. We say which nations and which period a figure covers, and we never present one nation's figures as the UK's. Our charts are drawn from the same checked figures. "Show the data" gives you the numbers, and we never fill a gap in them.
Joining the dots
The news is where we start. We add what belongs with it: the related data or earlier story, a different point of view, the questions it raises, and what it means for you. Where we hold a view, it's labelled "Our view" and kept apart from the reporting. Where we don't, there's no view.
Running stories
When a story keeps moving, we give it a page: a summary of where it stands, dated, and a timeline of everything we've published on it.
The care calendar
Dates come from the organisations that set them. Each entry is marked confirmed or provisional, updated weekly, and linked to our coverage where we have some.
What we don't do
We don't report on our own services or on Baton as news. Nobody pays to appear.