Public Bodies (Joint Working) Scotland Bill: Business and Regulatory Impact Assessment

Enforcement, sanctions and monitoring

Accountability

The Bill sets out that integration authorities will be established and removes Community Health Partnership committees, which will be taken off the statute book. Health Boards and local authorities will jointly be required to set up an integration authority. Each integration authority will cover a single local authority area, unless consent from the Minister is sought to establish a multi council partnership.

Integration authorities will be accountable to the full Council and the full Health Board, and to the public, for the delivery of nationally agreed outcomes. Outcome measures will focus initially on improving care for adults with complex support needs and will be included in all Community Planning Partnerships' Single Outcome Agreements.

The nationally agreed outcomes will apply across health and social care; will be transparent and accountable locally and to the Scottish Parliament via Ministers; and will provide assurance that local variation is appropriate to local needs, and does not result in variation of quality of care. Providing information and evidence from across health and social care will be critical to demonstrating progress, and external scrutiny processes will be appropriately aligned to support integration of adult health and social care.

Monitoring

A sliding scale of improvement and performance support will be put in place to assure the delivery of national outcomes by integration authorities to ensure sharing of good practice, benchmarking, leadership and organisational development, development of commissioning skills and other priority areas. Where integration authorities fail to deliver national targets, performance support will be offered and, where critical, put in place to assure the delivery of targets.

We recognise that effective collaborative working with external scrutiny partners will be important, and will work with the Care Inspectorate and Healthcare Improvement Scotland to ensure an appropriately integrated approach to reviewing the quality of service and outcomes achieved.

As work progresses on this agenda, we will be considering further methods of monitoring the progress of integration.

Sanctions for non-compliance

Current Ministerial sanctions for failure to deliver under legislative requirements, in broad terms, will apply to the new partnership arrangements. The Bill will provide further detail about the establishment of new partnerships and sanctions for non-compliance.

Implementation and delivery plan

The Bill is scheduled to be introduced in May with a view to receive Royal Assent in February 2014. Implementation is expected to be one year from enactment of the Bill, by Spring 2015.

Post-implementation review

Each integration authority will be required to produce a strategic plan over the medium and long term (3 years and 10 years respectively), which will be reviewed as part of the process of continued assurance. There will be joint scrutiny arrangements of services and commissioning plans carried out by Healthcare Improvement Scotland and the Care Inspectorate.

The Scottish Government will review the legislation to ensure that it is still fit for purpose within 10 years of enactment.