Case Study: Essex County Council achieves data-driven forecasting of social care demand with DataCamp

Essex County Council - Customer Case Study

Essex County Council (ECC) sought to improve delivery of social care and health services across a population of over 1.8 million but faced major data and skills challenges: only about 20% of their information was structured (leaving some 2.5 TB effectively untapped), staff relied heavily on Excel, and COVID-19 disrupted referral signals for vulnerable people. To close the skills gap and build predictive analytics and natural language processing capabilities, ECC joined DataCamp in 2019 and adopted DataCamp’s self‑paced learning program to upskill technical and non‑technical teams.

Using DataCamp, ECC rolled out organization‑wide training (primarily in R and Python) for more than 50 learners, including partner agencies, logging over 200 hours of learning. Staff applied new skills to build some 40 forecasts with probability analyses to model demand for care services and to optimize food bank locations, and began extracting insights from unstructured case notes via NLP—concrete outcomes that improved resource planning and helped ECC deliver services more effectively with support from DataCamp.

Essex County Council

Stephen Simpkin

Data Science Fellow