National Care Service - realising rights and responsibilities: regional forums - findings summary

About Realising rights and responsibilities

This report relates to the feedback we have gathered from the Realising rights and responsibilities theme. This was collected at the events in:

• Glasgow
• Stranraer
• Skye
• Shetland

There was also an online event on this theme for people who could not attend an in-person event (for example due to ongoing concerns about Covid).

In total 97 people took part in the Realising rights and responsibilities sessions.

The National Care Service (NCS) will be governed by a set of principles setting out that social care and community health services are essential for human rights in Scotland. The NCS will have equality and dignity at its heart.

The first phase of co-design for Realising rights and responsibilities is focussed on developing the NCS Charter of Rights and Responsibilities (‘the charter’). The charter will help people to better understand their rights and what they can expect from the NCS. The charter will also provide a clear way to get further support and advice or how to make a complaint if rights are not met.

The charter is being developed with people with lived experience of accessing and providing community health, social work and social care support, including unpaid carers, to ensure that it meets their needs.

The first phase of co-design (the understanding phase) took place between April and June 2022 and focussed on:

• understanding people’s knowledge of care-specific rights
• ideas about how the NCS charter could address challenges
• views on how people wanted to use the NCS charter
• what would make the charter accessible.

From this, we developed some early draft content for the charter. Over the summer we have been carrying out further co-design on this early draft to identify potential themes, structure and content.