Reshaping Care For Older People - Update Paper

JOINT FOREWORD

Foreword by Alex Neil MSP, Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing

I am pleased to be able to publish this "refresh" report of the Reshaping Care for Older People Programme. The Programme has already been a huge success, thanks not least to our partners in local government, the third and independent sectors but also to all who have grasped the importance of adapting our services to meet the health and care needs of our current and future increasingly older population.

Much has happened since we published Reshaping Care for Older People: A Programme for Change 2011-2021. It is clear we have now to reflect on the achievements so far in shifting the balance and to share the evidence and good practice at local level which has been supported by the Joint Improvement Team and the Improvement Network for Reshaping Care and Integration. We are already seeing good results from the Change Fund on local services that meet individual and community needs. We are promoting the integration of health and social care and self-directed support to ensure we deliver services that people want; to provide a flexible range of options; and to commission services that help people remain independent in their own communities for as long as possible in homely settings. This change is good for the people who will use those services now and in the future - and it also makes sense for the public purse.

I am aware so much has changed and is still changing. I hope that partners welcome this setting out of our achievements, current policy landscape and our reiteration of what we are trying to achieve and why - namely to meet the welcome growth in the number of people living for longer in their own homes in Scotland, to ensure our older people are cared for with dignity and compassion and are seen as an asset not a burden in our society. I am pleased this report sets out outcomes for reshaping care so as we move forward together we are all clear about how we will measure our progress.

I am proud that Scotland is a compassionate, caring country hallmarked by our distinctive policy of free personal and nursing care to which we are fully committed. We have watched closely as our national and international partners have looked at how they might meet the challenges of their own ageing population. Where we can learn from others we will bring this to bear in our own policies but where we need to go in a distinctive direction to meet the needs of the people of Scotland, we will do so. I am also pleased to say that this report does not shy away from discussing the economic challenges we face, and sets out some of the work to develop scenarios based on the future demographic projections. We will need to collectively consider how we can effectively rise to those challenges. I hope that setting out these scenarios will be a further catalyst for that collaboration to take place.

Foreword from Cllr Peter Johnson, COSLA spokesperson for Health and Wellbeing

Scottish Local Government continues to be committed to working with older people to ensure that their health and well-being is optimised. Since the beginning of the Reshaping Care programme, we have worked with our partners in the NHS, third sector and independent sectors to deliver innovation and improvement in the service and support options available to older people in communities across Scotland.

But we are determined not to rest there - we recognise there is more to do. We think that the future shape of health and care services needs to look very different from what we have in place just now. We want to see more control passed to the individual. We want to shift resources away from institutional care and into community based support. And we want to make sure that we have fair funding arrangements in place which will underpin sustainable public services into the future.

The demographic profile of the country is changing and this report restates our two-step solution: to optimise care arrangements through closer integration of health and social care services; and to identify the financial impact of increasing levels of need and in time lay the path towards a sustainable funding model. We look forward to working with all our partners in pursuit of these twin objectives.