The State of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in Adult Social Care 2025

October 7th 2025

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) approaches have become increasingly popular in the Adult Social Care Sector as they allow organisations to reduce the costs associated with providing staff with devices.

This research report explores the risks associated with the current state, and recommends improvements measures to begin to address the risks.

This report aims to offer three main contributions:

1. A detailed review of the current state of BYOD usage in the ASC sector, encompassing the extent and distribution, the types of usage, user perspectives, organisational policies, and the existing technical controls that can be leveraged for security.
2. An analysis of the risks involved with BYOD, with the aim of developing a sorted list of risks that considers where the risks arise, how frequently, who they affect, and how they consolidate.
3. A list of improvement measures that address the outlined risks, prioritised by the magnitude of their impact and the effort involved in their implementation.

The Digital Care Hub, commissioned The PSC to conduct this research as part of the Better Security, Better Care programme, which is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care.