Person-centred care: advice for non-executive board members

Our Voice

Which of the five ‘Must Do With Me’ principles does this relate to? 

Our Voice is all about engaging the people of Scotland to make health and social care better. It is based on a vision where everyone can influence how Scotland’s Health and Social Care services are run. This includes those who use them, families, carers, organisations, and members of the public. The Our Voice framework allows everyone to engage purposefully with health and social care providers to continuously improve and transform services. People will be provided with feedback on the impact of their engagement, or a demonstration of how their views have been considered.

Our Voice has been developed in a partnership involving the Scottish Health Council, Healthcare Improvement Scotland public partners, COSLA, the Scottish Government, The ALLIANCE and other third sector partners. The views of over 1,000 individual sand groups also contributed to the design and development of the framework.

Our Voice operates every level of health and social care to ensure that the voice of the service is heard and to support improvement and empower people to be equal partners in their care:

At national level, there are many ways to involve as wide a range of people in discussions about national health and social care policy and how to improve services. The Our Voice Citizen’s Panel provides a ‘public voice’ on a variety of health and social care issues. The Citizens Panel has enabled the voices of people to be heard on a range of important issues including what makes for a good consultation with a doctor, how we can use our medicines better, and how digital technologies can improve healthcare. New models of deliberative engagement are creating opportunities for people to engage in national policy debate. At local level, peer networks are being developed to support people to engage purposefully in local planning processes. The Scottish Involvement Network is a peer led network for people working in engagement and participation. The Scottish Involvement Network has over 50 members including those from housing, health and social care partnerships, the NHS and third sector organisations. All of the members contribute to the development of the network and the delivery of it’s goals to improve the practice of engagement and to raise awareness of the importance of engagement in decision making. The Scottish Health Council’s Participation Toolkit has been developed to support health and social care staff to more effectively involve patients and service users, carers and members of the public in decisions about their own care and in the design and delivery of local services. At individual level people should have the information and support they need to make decisions about their care and treatment. Shared decision making is the cornerstone of Realistic Medicine’s drive to better support people to be meaningfully involved in decisions about their care. People will be empowered and supported to feed back about the care and services they receive, and this feedback will be used to drive and inform continuous improvement to services.