National Care Service and co-design: easy read

National Care Service Co-design

What is co-design?

Co-design means everyone taking part in the way something is planned and put together has a chance to share their views and ideas.

Everyone's view is important and everyone helps to make decisions.

Social care is services that support people with daily living so they can be as independent as possible.

It includes things like:

• support at home from a paid carer with things like getting washed and dressed and using the toilet
• meals on wheels
• personal alarms that someone can press if they have a fall
• home adaptations like ramps, grab rails, stairlifts and walk-in showers

The National Care Service (NCS) will make sure everyone has equal access to social care support and gets a high quality of care wherever they live in Scotland.

It is important that we put lived experience and human rights at the centre of our work to co-design the National Care Service.

In this document lived experience means people who get or give social care support.

It is important that our work to co-design the National Care Service is:

• done in partnership with people who get or give social care support
• is accessible - available and usable by everyone
• includes a mix of different kinds of people who have different experiences.

People who get or give social care support are experts in how services work now.

Experts are people who know a lot about something.

They know how services could be improved.

Improved means made better.

This will make sure the National Care Service gives people what they need.

We will have an NCS Gathering event every year with people who get and give social care support.

It will check:

• how work on the development of the National Care service is going
• if co-design is working well
• can we work with people in a better way?

How has consultation happened so far?

The Scottish Government agreed to start the consultation process on a National Care Service in the first 1 hundred days of this Parliament.

A consultation means asking people what they think of something.

A consultation ran from 9 August until 2 November 2021.

It asked what people thought about:

• improving how social care support is planned and delivered

This included rights to breaks from caring and the cost of social care support.

• what the National Care Service will do

• how Integration Joint Boards will be changed to become Community Health and Social Care Boards
• improving rules and how it is checked to see if rules are being followed

• ethical commissioning

Ethical means following the rules and doing what is right.

Commissioning is how it is decided what services are needed, who will deliver them and how they are checked to see if they are working well.

Ethical commissioning in the National Care Service would make sure across Scotland:

• we include and communicate with:
  • people who get care and support
  • those who support people to access care and support
  • families and friends
  • unpaid carers
  • staff and organisations that give care and support services

• we look at the most important issues that affect how care is planned, designed, given and checked

• we value and support staff

When the National Care Service consultation was open, the Scottish Government had almost 100 engagement sessions.

Engagement sessions were events to ask:

• the public
• organisations we work with
• stakeholders
• and voluntary organisations

what they thought about the ideas in the consultation.

Stakeholders are people or organisations who support our work.

15 sessions were open to anyone to join and some sessions had more than 1 hundred people joining in.

Most events were held online because of Covid-19.

3 face-to-face events were held in:

• South Ayrshire
• Aberdeen City
• and Inverclyde

3 thousand people attended these engagement sessions.

More than 1 thousand 3 hundred people answered the National Care Service consultation.

In February 2022 the answers were put online if people had said that was ok.

A report about the answers was also put online.

The Scottish Government has started a stakeholder working group to check plans for co-design and how we will ask people what they think.

This makes sure that the views of people with lived experience are at the centre of the development of the National Care Service.

People who have experienced social care support are the real experts – if they get or give social care support or are a family member of someone who does.

There will be detailed plans for the National Care Service during this Parliament – before 2025.

How will decisions be made?

Scottish Ministers are responsible to the Scottish Parliament for how public money is used and how policy work happens.

Ministers will make decisions about:

• what the National Care Service will do and how it will work
• who checks the way that local organisations work

Ministers will take account of views from a wide mix of people before they take ideas to the Scottish Parliament.

Local organisations will still have an important part to play in the design and delivery of social care support services.

We will work with local services to make sure co-design happens in the same way across the country.

How will we make sure co-design works well?

The National Care Service Design School will give guidance, training and support to the organisations and people who are designing services.

Good co-design can only happen when:

• people leading the co-design of parts of the National Care Service know how to do it well

• people with lived experience are properly supported to take part

• people with lived experience can get the information and training needed to take part
• there are no barriers to stop people getting information and training

Barriers could be things like:

• not having transport
• events or information not being accessible
• not having practical or emotional support

What is happening now?

April – June 2022

We are having 'NCS Design Investigations' with members of the public to look at the most important things that people have said in the consultation we have just done.

We are inviting a wide mix of people to take part.

This will include people with lived experience of getting or giving care services (including people who give care to family or friends).

We will start by looking at:

• a Charter of Rights
• a way for people to complain about services
• an online social care and health record

After the first few events we will:

• speak to people who have been involved to check if things are going well

• decide if we can do work in a better way and have better outcomes of these sessions

An outcome is the way we want to see something turn out.

Summer 2022

We will start the NCS Design School.

It will be a space for people who get or give social care services to work together.

We will also start a Lived Experience Partners Panel.

This will be a way:

• for people to say they would like to be involved in co-design events
• to help us decide how people can get involved

This will be open to all people who live in Scotland.

Places will be advertised on the Scottish Government website.

The first things we will talk about will be:

• what information have the NCS Investigations given us?
• is co-design working well?

We will have the first NCS Gathering event.

It will bring together:

• people who have taken part in the co-design sessions
• elected representatives from a range of political parties

• people with lived experience
• other stakeholders

They will look at what information the NCS Design Investigations have given us.

The co-design events are just the start.

We will keep having co-design events to support the design, delivery and improvement of the National Care Service in the future.

How we will communicate

We will keep putting information online about:

• how work is going
• how people can get involved in co-design work
• how and when people who need social care support have been involved

And finally…

Delivering the National Care Service is a very big piece of work.

We know it will not be easy.

It will take us time to learn how to do this together.

The NCS Design School will support us to do the work.