Access Social Care Conference 2026: Review and Top Highlights

Andy Sparkes, General Manager for Local Government and Technology Enabled Care (TEC), kicked things off with a refreshing dose of candour. A year ago, he admitted, the business was in a different place. Now? The mood in the room was noticeably different - and Andy wasted no time explaining why. 

"We are in a radically different place, and the reason is AI." 

This is not a peripheral pivot. AI is now front and centre of how Access builds its products, how it operates internally, and how it believes social care needs to think about the future. Andy's four areas of focus were:  

All of which gave the day a clear spine to hang everything else from. 

What set the tone more than anything was the invitation he extended to everyone in the room: Access wants to build with its customers, not in spite of them. "We no longer want to go away, sit in a dark room for six months, and come back with something. We want to engage with you as we go." 

Chris Wilson, Product Director for Local Government and TEC, and Product Manager Angela Robertson took a live demonstration approach, which gave the room something more immediate than slides ever could. If you want to understand why Evo is at the heart of our social care strategy, this session brought it to life. 

The Navigator interface gave the room its first real look at what working within a genuinely integrated platform feels like: a personalised home view pulling together case loads, tasks, and data from across Access products in one place. The natural language search alone - pulling results from Access Mosaic, Access Adam, and other solutions simultaneously – seemed to get the room visibly excited. 

The AI assistant demo within Access Mosaic was the standout moment of the morning. Recording a placement change for a looked-after child, which currently involves navigating multiple screens and remembering a lot of steps, became a guided, conversational process. The assistant checks in, confirms before acting, flags what else needs updating. "Rather than just saying no - which is what you get in a lot of legacy systems - it can give a practitioner a natural language explanation of why something might not be appropriate," Angela said. "That is really powerful." 

Chris was careful to draw the line between AI that automates and AI that assists - and emphatic that the human stays in the loop throughout. It is a distinction that matters enormously in a sector where the stakes are this high.

Rashpal Bishop, VP at ADASS and Executive Director for Adult Social Care and Health at Sandwell Council, brought exactly the kind of external voice a day like this benefits from - authoritative, frank, and not here to tell anyone what they wanted to hear. 

She drew on ADASS survey data to paint an honest picture of where the sector stands on its digital journey: ambition is there, but consistent investment is not. Prevention keeps getting bumped down the priority list by the sheer weight of immediate demand. "Digital and AI offer the clearest route to bringing prevention to the forefront," she said - "rather than it always being a second thought." 

Her point about fragmentation hit home. Local authorities spending time and money piloting the same tools independently, often making the same mistakes, is a problem the sector cannot keep ignoring.  

The Q&A that followed was one of the liveliest of the day - touching on AI governance, how councils build digital confidence in their workforce, and who is ultimately responsible for overseeing technology enabled care. Rashpal's advice on the latter was characteristically direct: get the right people around the table from the start, not after mistakes have already been made.

The problem Access NotesCentre is solving is one the room understood immediately - anyone who has watched a social worker spend the better part of their week on paperwork needs little convincing of the case for change. 

The rebuilt interface is noticeably sharper, but the real headline is the template builder. Organisations can now configure their own output formats directly - upload an existing Word form, and AI populates the structure within seconds. Custom instructions mean the output sounds like your team, not a generic AI. "People have their own voice, their own way of doing things," Becky said. "NotesCentre should reflect that." 

Integrated through Evo, it connects to Mosaic, to messaging and video calling, and to the AI agent functionality Chris had previewed earlier. The whole thing is built to sit within a working day, not disrupt it. 

As it turns out, the universe has a sense of humour. While the LG Finance Update was underway, our writer found herself on the same table as representatives from Peterborough City Council - which, as it happens, is where she grew up.  

What started as a coincidence turned into a proper conversation, and we ended up stepping out together to record a case study and customer testimonial. Watch this space for their story. 

Nerys Hebdon, Ellie Howarth from SCIE, and Paul Berney from the TSA closed the afternoon with a session that grounded everything in human reality. The numbers are stark: up to 1.7 million people could be living with dementia in England and Wales by 2040, there are 131,000 unfilled roles in adult social care, and budgets are not growing to match demand. "The cavalry is not coming," said Ellie. "Enter technology."  

A short film featuring Monica, a 74-year-old service user, made the case better than any slide could. Her daughter described the shift from constant worry to real confidence her mum was safe. "I have definitely got my mum back." The economics tell their own story too: Monica's technology costs around £300 a year against an average home care package of £18,000. You can watch Monica's story and read the full case study here. 

Paul Berney closed with a direct challenge to the room: "We are not saying it is your fault you have not invested enough. We are saying we have not told the story right - and now we are going to." 

Andy Sparkes brought the day to a close with the same energy he had opened it with - and perhaps even a little more of it. Evo is live, the roadmap is clear, and the pace of development is faster than it has ever been. But what he seemed most energised by was the room itself: the questions, the challenges, the willingness to engage. 

"What we showed you today is not actually the stuff that excites me most," he said. "Next time, we'll show you what we're really building towards." 

The conversation didn't stop there. The following day we were back at the same venue for the Access Children and Young People's Conference, where many of the same themes - digital transformation, AI, and the future of care - played out for a different part of the sector.  

To find out more about Access Evo and our social care solutions, visit theaccessgroup.com or speak to your Account Manager or Customer Success Manager.