National Care Service: Factsheet

How the NCS will reflect people’s experience

We will co-design national parts of the NCS with people who access and deliver community health, social work and social care support. This will include a Charter explaining people’s rights. It will also include accessible pathways to complaints and remedies if rights are not met. It will also include an electronic integrated social care and health record.

During the co-design of the NCS we will speak to people from across Scotland. Over the last year alone we have already engaged over 1,000 people in co-design activities. This work will continue.

Co-design brings people with different life experiences and views together. It promotes understanding and can help people reach a consensus on topics.

Our co-design work includes people such as:

• people who access services that will fall under the NCS
• their family and support network
• unpaid carers
• the workforce
• organisations and people who deliver services that will fall under the NCS
• people who have accesses or delivered these services in the past
• third sector organisations

How we will use the findings from co-design

Co-design brings people who are affected by decisions into the decision-making process. Our co-design work is already having an influence on the way we’re designing the NCS. Our Workforce Charter is one example of how this works in practice.

Co-designing the Workforce Charter

The Scottish Government ran a series of co-design sessions over November and December 2023 to help develop a Workforce Charter. These sessions included Scottish Government staff, professional advisors and members of the workforce. To recruit for these sessions we used our Lived Experience Experts Panel (LEEP). We also selected organisations directly.

The goal of the sessions was to understand the need and purpose of a Workforce Charter and to gain feedback on a draft. We are now developing a Workforce Charter draft and sense checking it against the findings from these sessions.