National Care Service: co-design of the draft NCS charter of rights and responsibilities

The co-design process

We are co-designing the Charter in 3 stages:

• understanding
• sense-making
• agreeing

We have now completed the first two stages and have produced an early draft of the Charter. We will test this draft as part of the next stage – the agreeing stage.

Over 500 people were involved in the first 2 stages of co-design. This included:

• people accessing and delivering community health, social work and social care support
• lived experience panels
• stakeholder organisations and their members

Stages of co-design

Stage 1: Understanding

The understanding stage took place between April and June 2022. We gathered information about:

• what people knew about their care-specific rights
• how people wanted to use the Charter and how it could help them
• previous experience of using charters
• thoughts on what would help make the Charter as accessible as possible

Using the information we gathered, we were better able to understand how we could design the Charter to:

• support people to understand their rights when accessing National Care Service support
• explain the pathway for upholding those rights if things go wrong

Stage 2: Sense-making

The sense-making stage ran from September 2022 to December 2023 and was completed in 2 rounds.

The first round ran from September 2022 to March 2023. During this, we developed the initial themes identified in the understanding stage. We worked with people with wider and more diverse experiences of community health, social work and social care, including people providing care and support. The result was the structure and content for an early draft of the Charter.

The second round of sense-making co-design ran from June 2023 to December 2023. During this round, we worked with people with lived experience of accessing and providing services to further develop the draft Charter. This was to ensure that the content accurately reflected what people had told us.

You can read the early draft Charter we produced from sense-making here: Draft NCS Charter (parliament.scot).

Stage 3: Agreeing

We are planning to run the agreeing stage in 2024/25. It will involve:

• adding more detail from other National Care Service co-design work, such as the complaints process and a definition of community health
• updating the draft Charter to include information about certain children’s services and justice social work services as appropriate
• updating parts of the current draft for any changes to legislation or policy
• testing the draft to improve usability, language, structure and format, including visual design
• developing alternative formats and ways to access the Charter

We will continue to update and refine the draft Charter until close to the launch of the National Care Service. This will mean there will be more opportunities for people with lived experience to improve the Charter.

Methodology

We used different ways to gather people’s views, opinions and knowledge as part of the co-design of the Charter. This includes:

• individual and group interviews
• feedback from existing lived experience panels
• official-led and stakeholder-led workshops
• the 2023 NCS regional forums

In addition, Healthcare Improvement Scotland undertook a ‘Gathering Views’ exercise on the draft Charter.

Recruitment

We have deliberately worked to recruit people with diverse views and ensure that seldom heard voices have been involved throughout.

We used protected characteristics, as defined in the Equality Act 2010, to target recruitment for the understanding and sense-making stages.

We also included other marginalised or stigmatised groups including:

• people who have experience of homelessness
• people who have experience of substance use
• people who have been the victims of crime
• people who have experience of mental ill health

We are still considering the future of justice social work and certain children’s services within the National Care Service. However, we wanted to make sure the views of people who access these services were included from the start.

We worked with organisations representing people from these groups to ensure that their preferences for engagement, as well as trauma informed practice guidelines, were followed.