National Outcomes for Community Care
The Joint Future report, published in 2000, recommended that councils and the NHS should work more closely together to make sure that people who needed community care services got the right service at the right time, with the minimum bureaucratic fuss going on behind the scenes.
Since 2000, the Scottish Executive Health Department has worked hard to support local partnerships in doing this better. To begin with, they asked local councils and NHS partners to report on the processes they had put in place to make sure people got the right service at the right time. However, it is possible to have great processes that don’t really improve things for people. This often happens if you don’t put the experience of the person using the service first when deciding how to provide the service. So the Scottish Executive Health Department has tried to get local partnerships to focus on the outcomes for people who use services, at all stages of planning and monitoring services. This has been a gradual process, but last summer they decided to go the whole way and develop a new “National Outcomes” approach. This has been done in a very inclusive way. 60 people from across Scotland were invited to a 2- day event at Ingliston in November. Voluntary sector, carers, people who use services, academic researchers, GPs, as well as the usual NHS and council planners and mangers were included. I was lucky enough to be invited and am proud to have been part of the group that came up with the first draft of 4 high level national outcomes, supported by 16 measures and a broad range of targets.
The four national outcomes are:
- improved health;
- improved wellbeing;
- improved social inclusion; and
- improved independence and responsibility.
That was the start of a journey which needs all of the people involved in local health and care services to change our thinking so that the benefits for people using services come first in all that we do. You can find out more at: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Health/care/JointFuture/NationalOutcomes
Local people can get involved in agreeing what our local Midlothian Improvement Targets should be. Getting these right will be a very important part of the outcomes work. The joint planning groups will be reviewing their Local Improvement Targets over the next couple of months. Contact Eric Johnstone for more details.