National Care Service Forum 2022: ministerial speeches

The success of the Forum and how we will continue to work to build the National Care Service together - Humza Yousaf, Health and Social Care Secretary.

Good afternoon,

I am grateful to those who worked on the Forum – the team that organised it, and also partners that we have worked with. I’m really grateful to our phenomenal BSL interpreters who I’m always in awe of. It’s a hard shift to do this through the course of a day, even if there’s a couple of you.

My thanks to the team at Perth Concert Hall who have kept us very well fed and watered as well. My thanks to the panellists and those who have given speeches. I missed Kiana’s speech but I heard it was unbelievable and pretty inspiring. I will get a copy of it.

Thanks to our wonderful Chair, Ann Marie, for guiding us through proceedings and keeping us bang on time. And of course thanks to each and every one of you.

I mean what I said - this is not a one-off event, I’ve been involved in those types of events before and you lose track of any progress that’s been made. This is going to be a regular Forum and all of the notes that you have written, that our note takers have taken, will come in front of Kevin and I.

This is one way of getting involved but there are other ways of getting involved and participating in the National Care Service and the co-design of the process. Please do apply for the Lived Experience Experts Panel. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell someone that you care for, tell the workforce, tell your colleagues about those panels that are taking place because again they are going to directly inform the thinking behind the National Care Service.

I want to give you a final assurance that neither Kevin or I are sitting in our offices with a fait accompi of what the National Care Service will look like. This is not a tick box exercise to say we’ve listened to you – we are genuinely co-designing this service with the feedback you directly give us.

I promise you a commitment that - even once the legislation is passed - there’s a whole load of co-design work to do for the NCS to be operational. And let me end by saying that the core values of the National Care Service are that it is person-centred, with human rights at the core of it, that it values our workforce, and demonstrates their value. And ethical commissioning of the National Care Service is going to be at the heart of the NCS of the future. But we won’t be waiting for the NCS where we can make change now, for the betterment of the public of whom we serve. So, with that, I’d like to thank all of you for attending.

Please get in touch with me if you have any comments or questions that haven’t been answered here. I will get back to you.

Thank you and have a very safe trip back home.