National Care Service - keeping care support local part 1 – local services: regional forums - findings summary

Next steps

What’s next for keeping care support local

We will use what we have learned during the regional forums to continue to develop the approach to local services.

We’re going to start some work to help improve local care service provision. This will include how we can:

• make sure people with lived experience can have a stronger voice in local decision making
• balance providing the same standard of service across Scotland with meeting the different needs in local areas
• promote better-connected community health and social care

We will continue to analyse what people have told us to see if there are gaps in what we understand about what is working well or not working well, and check for areas we need to explore further. We will also work with people to develop proposals that address the issues they have raised.

How services are working at the moment

We will work with people to develop proposals on the range of interconnected and complex issues we heard about in relation to current service provision, in particular:

• the lack of availability of services,
• inequalities between services available in urban and rural locations,
• and difficulties for people in moving between areas.

How people would like to be involved in decisions

We will work with people and other parts of the National Care Service work to develop ideas for:

• making it easier for people to learn about how decisions about the National Care Service and community health and care services in their area are made

Finding the balance between national consistency and local flexibility

We will work with people to further explore and develop ideas for:

• what elements of the community health and social care system should be standardised across the whole country while retaining flexibility in relation to how services are delivered to ensure they can be tailored to local need
• how to embed an outcomes-focussed approach in all aspects of community health and social care delivery.

What ‘local’ means to people

We will work with people to further explore and develop ideas for:

• making it easier for local people who use community health and social care services to get involved in decisions about local services
• understanding how to get the right balance between online and in person services, whilst ensuring that people who are digitally excluded are not disadvantaged
• community health and care services are integrated with other local services, like community groups, housing and transport

Ambitions for the National Care Service

We will work with people to explore:

• how the National Care Service might help promote a preventative approach to community health and social care provision
• how to help communities and local people drive a change in their areas about how community health and social care is perceived
• how to ensure local people know their rights
• ideas for ways to make it easier for local communities and people to provide care support to others.