Improving health and social care service resilience over public holidays: data analysis

8 Next steps for ISD

ISD have listed below actions they can undertake which could assist with the delivery of several of the recommendations in the main report, subject to agreement and resourcing. These will cut across Primary Care, Acute Care and Social Care.

Short term actions - for winter 2017/18:

1. In order to assist NHS Boards to make full use of the information and predictions included in System Watch for planning purposes, ISD will produce a ‘how to use System Watch’ guide for users.

2. ISD will investigate making System Watch available to Integrated Joint Boards ( IJB) – currently only available NHS (on N3 network).

Longer term – by winter 2018:

1. ISD will establish a Short Life Working Group with representatives from NHS Boards and IJBs to review the content and functionality of System Watch. This would be to ensure the tool is timely and fit for purpose and assists with an intelligence led service.

2. These developments may focus on including additional predictions, inclusion of weekly A&E data, further syndromic surveillance, investigate the impact that the weather has on services. This also links with the AC.5 recommendation around case-mix and predicting the conditions people will use urgent and emergency care for, over public holidays.

3. ISD could work with and provide local unscheduled care staff with analyses on clinical reasons that people have contact urgent and emergency care hospital services over public holidays.

4. Subject to the successful completion of the on-going programme to develop the Source social care data as the unifying social care dataset for Scotland, individual level social care data will become available at national level for multiple purposes, including informing the work of Health and Social Care Partnerships in their planning and delivery of joined up care.

5. There is currently a gap around urgent care delivered at Primary Care in Hours (generally working hours Monday to Friday). A programme of work is underway to be able to answer specific questions for primary care not just urgent care. A link to this can be found at the following web page: http://spire.scot/