Open Government action plan 2021 to 2025 - commitment 2: health and social care

Progress to June 2024

Commitment 2: health and social care

Milestone

Develop and deliver a first iteration of the ‘design school’ model in key health and social care areas, such as the delivery of the National Care Service.

Progress and next steps

The 'Design School' is the name given to the wrap around support and training that is offered to stakeholder organisations, policy teams and people with lived experience to work together on policy and service change.

Design school support is currently being delivered in two key areas in health and social care:

• the National Care Service (NCS) programme, which has committed to design with the people who access and deliver social care support and other relevant services
• the Getting It Right For Everyone (GIRFE) Pathfinder Project, in which Health and Social Care Partnership Teams have committed to co-design an adult practice model for health and social care by working with their service users as well as practitioners and staff

The National Care Service design school

Progress

The National Care Service (NCS) is partnering with organisations that represent communities under-represented in the work so far. Support and guidance has been provided by the Office of the Chief Designer to ensure continuity in approach. Co-design sessions started in November and are being led by the following organisations:

• Minority Ethnic Carers of People Project (MECOPP)

• Sacro
• Simon Community
• LGBT Health & Wellbeing
• Alzheimer’s Scotland
• Action for Children
• Scottish Commission for Learning Disability
• Cemvo

Next steps

The seldom heard work will continue.

The next phase of co-design activity is now underway, with in-depth engagement due to take place through summer and into early autumn. Smaller focused teams will be supported to review and develop insights, allowing a move from ‘exploring the problems’ to ‘coming up with solutions’.

A ‘Governance and Representation’ workstream will consider how people with lived experience could be supported to be involved in planning and decision-making about social work, social care support and community health services. The co-design group for this workstream will comprise individuals who have relevant experience of sitting on boards, people with experience of planning or managing services, as well as people with lived experience of receiving or delivering social care services and representatives of stakeholder organisations.

A ’Complaints and Redress’ workstream will focus on defining design solutions for the complaints and redress system for the NCS.

This workstream will establish two co-design groups:

• one for people with lived experience of receiving social care or supporting someone else who receives social care and making a complaint or wanting to make a complaint about it
• one for people with lived experience of providing social care, especially handling complaints, or experiencing having a complaint being made about them

These groups will be established separately to ensure that all participants feel as safe as possible to maximise open discussion and stimulate high quality outputs. It is hoped that after three introductory sessions for each of the separate groups, it will be possible to combine these groups for three further combined sessions. This will  facilitate an exchange of views across people with a range of lived experience, including delivering services and receiving social care.

The seldom heard work will feed into both workstreams, with proposals from the co-design groups also being tested with a wide range of communities via the seldom heard voice work.

The publication of outputs will support transparency, while feedback and learning from the sessions will be incorporated into future work.

The GIRFE design school

Progress

By the end of May, the 8 Health and Social Care Partnership pathfinder teams will have completed a full end to end design process. Teams have engaged with service users and staff at key moments, working together to make sense of the information to ensure co-design insights are shared and incorporated into principles, policies and guidance for implementation. The final co-design phase took forward priority areas to support the development of consistent practice with prototypes developed on the ‘team around the person’, information sharing across different professions and agencies, the provision of accessible information on support and services, and relationship-based practice.

The partnership teams have had training and coaching through this process accompanied by a developing toolkit on how to meaningfully involve people in:

• understanding the problem
• coming up with solutions
• testing concepts and ideas

Next steps

We will finalise the prototypes and test plans developed through the co-design process. Testing will take place throughout May, and in June new insights will have been used to develop the prototypes further, along with plans to describe how these will be tested in a live environment.

The new Health and Social Care Partnership teams will be offered additional training as they support the testing phase. This will extend the reach of the cohort and enhance the evidence base for the national toolkit.

The co-design report and prototypes will be pulled together into a series of documents to support evidence and transparency for decision-making and implementation. This will be delivered in June, along with co-design tools and guidance and an outline for the next phase of work to support implementation.

Status

On schedule.

Milestone

Support the newly established Lived Experience Expert Panel and Stakeholder Register to meaningfully participate in decision-making within health and social care.

Progress and next steps

The Lived Experience Experts Panel (LEEP) is the main route to take part in the co-design of the National Care Service (NCS).

All public engagement opportunities for the National Care Service programme are advertised to LEEP members on an ongoing basis, most recently upcoming opportunities to co-design teams taking an in-depth look at governance and complaints. Invites have also been issued around opportunities to work on the workforce charter.

As a result of these opportunities being shared, more people have registered to join the panel, with the total now at 570.

Next steps

A selection process will take place for LEEP members who have applied to take part in the next round of co-deign activity.

LEEP remains open for new applications and feedback, and the ongoing programme of improvements will continue.

Status

On schedule.

Milestone

Develop and agree an approach to assessing impact and learning from co-design activities across health and social care.

Progress and next steps

The co-design maturity matrix is being developed to support teams to consider what good looks like for co-design, covering key criteria such as:

• capacity and capability for co-design
• senior sponsorship
• implementation of design decisions

This will form the basis of the evaluation frameworks to support teams to measure and improve their co-design activities. 

A draft evaluation framework has been created in line with the criteria covered within the co-design maturity matrix. This will be used to baseline readiness for co-design and support improvement activity for those maturing their approach.

Impact reports are being developed to demonstrate how insights from co-design activity are being used in decision-making.

Feedback mechanisms have also been developed and used throughout NCS and GIRFE engagement, to continuously improve the experience of co-design for participants.

Next steps

The latest version of the co-design maturity matrix and evaluation framework will be shared with the civic society group for feedback at the workshop agreed at the onboarding session in March.

The evaluation framework will be shared with Analytical Services colleagues in Scottish Government to support the development of person-centred measures for performance frameworks.

Feedback will continue to be gathered as part of the co-design process to provide the right information and support for participants.

These approaches will be developed as case studies, guidance and materials for re-use.

Status

On schedule.

Milestone

Continue to develop the remit and role of the civic society group to play an active and ongoing role as a critical friend, supporting the development and progress of co-design activity across health and social care.

Progress and next steps

The Third Sector Health and Social Care Collaborative has agreed to take on the new civic society group role.

An onboarding session to the work of the Open Government Partnership, an overview of the Health and Social Care commitment, and progress to date, took place in March. This group will act as a critical friend on progress and to support the development of guidance, methods and tools.

There was broad agreement that the best use of the group’s time and resources would be on the production of tangible outputs to promote participative ways of working. While agreeing to a dedicated workshop, the Collaborative will also include a specific standing item on the quarterly meeting for OGP progress updates to offer critique and peer support more generally.

Next steps

The civic society co-lead and the Office of the Chief Designer will join the Collaborative for a workshop session (proposed in May or June, subject to the availability of members) as agreed at the onboarding session. Members will focus their time on the reviewing the co-design approach and identifying priority materials for the next phase of work.

Status

On schedule.