Healthcare science national delivery plan consultation: analysis of responses

1.0 About this report

This report provides an analysis of responses to the Scottish Government's 'Consultation on proposals for a Healthcare Science National Delivery Plan'. The Healthcare Science (HCS) workforce and appropriate stakeholders were consulted between June-September 2014 around a series of proposals discussed in this report.

1.1 Background to the consultation

Healthcare scientists (HCSs) are an integral part of the infrastructure essential to the delivery of high-quality, safe and modern healthcare. They are the fourth largest clinical workforce in the Scottish Healthcare Service and contribute to 80% of all diagnostic decisions by providing information that underpins sound clinical decision-making with individual patients and their families in the context of advancing technology and increasing complexity.

Collectively, healthcare scientists in Scotland undertook over 60 million laboratory tests per year, 730,000 physiological measurements, and managed medical equipment across NHS Scotland with a replacement value in excess of £940 million.

Healthcare scientists already make a vital contribution to core healthcare provision across all sectors of the system. But with limited resources and rising demand, healthcare scientists have a duty to ensure they are working at the top of their clinical capability.

In a time of rapid change in the NHS, with ever-increasing demands on a finite resource, healthcare scientists are ideally placed to drive the innovation and improvement required to deliver more efficient and sustainable services for the future. NHS boards therefore need to fully harness untapped resources and include healthcare scientists in their planning and improvement work whenever possible.

The National Healthcare Science National Delivery Plan provides a unique opportunity to align the contribution of HCSs to the principles set out in the Healthcare Quality Strategy for NHS Scotland (Scottish Government, 2010), the 2020 Vision for Sustainable Quality in Scotland's Healthcare (Scottish Government, 2011) and the 2020 Route Map (2013). In particular, it seeks to maximise the contribution of HCS to a healthy organisational culture and help to create a sustainable, capable and integrated workforce with effective leadership and management.

1.2 Overview of Responses

There were 36 response documents to the HCS National Delivery Plan (NDP) consultation, along with two engagement workshops. The graph below shows where these responses came from.

Graph 1 - Categories of respondents to the HCS consultation

It can be estimated that approximately 1500 'voices' contributed to the HCS NDP consultation. The graph below shows the number of voices who contributed from each area.

Graph 2 - Number of 'voices' within the categories of respondents

One individual paper did have the input from two persons.

Overall the consultation asked a series of questions and sets out a potential set of proposals. Graph 3 and 4 show the percentage and count (respectively), of respondents' replies where they stated an opinion. Opinion statement replies have been categorised as 'agree', 'disagree and 'mixed'. Opinion statement replies can be with regard to any question and/or proposal set out in the consultation document. We have visualised this data further by splitting into specific work streams: Leadership, Integrated Services, Unnecessary Testing, Workforce, Other.

In general there was support for the overall theme of the consultation and the proposals being suggested.

Graph 3 - Percentages of opinion comments received

Graph 4 - Number of opinion comments received