National Care Service: factsheet

Focused national programmes for priority areas

The Scottish Government is working on several national programmes in partnership with local leaders. We are using them to target areas of urgent need, where a national approach can help support local delivery.

Below are some of the key national programmes we are currently working on.

Coming Home

We are continuing to take action on delayed hospital discharge through our Coming Home programme. This includes new support registers to help with local planning, building on our investment into health boards. We will also keep working with local partners on community-based solutions to reduce future hospital use. 

National Mission on Drugs

Our National Mission on Drugs, announced in January 2021, is supported by an additional £250m of funding over the course of the current Parliamentary session. Its goal is to reduce drug-related deaths and harms.

Getting it Right for Everyone (GIRFE)

We have co-designed Getting it Right for Everyone (GIRFE) with Health and Social Care Partnerships and the people of Scotland, starting in 2023. This is a multi-agency approach to support and services from young adulthood to end of life care. Pilot projects are ongoing across the country. 

We published a national GIRFE toolkit in December 2024. It focuses on developing a ‘Team Around the Person’ to promote and enable person-led approaches to care and support in Scotland.

The toolkit also includes case studies to show how the GIRFE person-led approach has improved outcomes for:

• people receiving care and support
• the health and social care system itself

The toolkit is a starting point for sharing learning and developing our GIRFE approach together across Scotland. Health and social care organisations and wider public services and policymakers can all use it.

Self-Directed Support (SDS)

To ensure people have choice and control over their support, we are working to deliver our Self-Directed Support improvement plan 2023 to 2027.

We have invested over £15 million up to April 2025 in delivering the plan, which is intended to help us to embed the principles of SDS within social care support in Scotland. These principles include dignity, involvement and informed choice.

We want people to have the chance to make decisions about their own social care support. We are working in partnership with councils, care providers, and COSLA to do this.

Support in the Right Direction

The Scottish Government has committed £9.9 million to relaunch the Support in the Right Direction Programme from 2024 to 2027. This programme will help make sure people across Scotland have access to:

• SDS information and advice
• information about accessing independent advocacy, brokerage, and preventative support

Dementia strategy for Scotland

We believe that up to 90,000 people are living with dementia in Scotland. We need to do more to support them to live well in their communities.

To do this, we have worked with the National Dementia Lived Experience Panel, and local and national partners. We have been developing and have started delivering our 10-year Dementia strategy for Scotland.

We have already made progress by delivering in partnership with people living with dementia. This includes:

• a co-produced national campaign asking society to ‘Rethink Dementia’, which reached over 3 million people
• additional investment of over £4 million to enhance post-diagnostic support and grow community resources for people following a diagnosis