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

Next steps

What’s next for realising rights and responsibilities

We will continue to co-design the charter, making changes and improvements until it is published when the NCS is launched. There are parts of the charter that are still to be developed and there will continue to be lots of opportunities to influence this.

Some of the things that we will do based on the learning from the summer forums includes:

• Provide examples of what some of the rights look like in practice. This will require further co-design with people with lived experience to make sure that it meets their needs.
• continue to co-design a definition of advocacy for the charter.
• review the information and guidance that people told us would be helpful in the charter. This will help us to find the clearest and most useful options for people. Options for more information and links to be put in the charter will then be taken back out to people with lived experience.
• look at the parts of the charter that people told us were vague and ambiguous and work to make them more declarative where possible. We understand why people have asked for these changes but some of them would make parts of the charter inaccurate. We will update as many of these statements as we can to provide more clarity while also making sure that all the information in the charter is correct.

We will make these changes, and many more, that people told us would help make the charter better. Once we have made these changes we will take the charter back out to co-design to make sure these changes are the correct ones.

Wider work to make the charter effective

We frequently heard from people that the rights in the charter do not typically reflect their experience of social care, social work and community health.

People felt that unless there was wider work in the National Care Service (NCS) to deliver on the rights in the charter, then it would not be possible for the charter to be effective.

There was an emphasis on ensuring that the rights in the charter are able to be delivered including by considering the investment required to do that.

People also suggested that there should be training on the charter for NCS staff to support them to deliver the charter rights.

People felt that the charter would need to be built into NCS systems and processes and that it should be enforceable through a robust and accessible complaints process.

We are working closely with other policy areas to make sure that the charter, the complaints process and advocacy work is aligned and works together effectively.

To ensure that the rights in the charter are delivered, we will continue to work with related workstreams that are focussed on improving services and supporting the workforce to investigate how these areas can support the delivery of the charter of rights in practice.

What’s next for the National Care Service

The Scottish Government remains committed to delivering a National Care Service to improve quality, fairness and consistency of provision that meets individuals’ needs. We are also working to make improvements to the social care system now.

What we have learned during the summer events will inform these early improvements, as well as the future structures and policies of the NCS, including the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill.

The Bill is currently in Committee stage in the Scottish Parliament. In January 2024, MSPs will take their first vote on the general principle of the Bill. This is called Stage 1.

Over the next 18 months we will continue to co-design with people who have experience of accessing and delivering social care support to design the National Care Service.

We will be doing additional work with people from groups we know are currently under represented in our work so far.

In the meantime, we will continue to drive forward improvements across the social care sector, including improving terms and conditions for our valued workforce - making it an attractive profession and bringing even more talent into the sector.