Scottish Health Council - making sure your voice counts
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NHS Boards are required to involve people in designing, developing and delivering the health care services they provide for them. NHS Boards' responsibilities in this area were initially set out in the document Patient Focus and Public Involvement (2001).
To reflect the importance of their Patient Focus and Public Involvement agenda, duties of public involvement and equal opportunities were placed on NHS Boards in the NHS Reform (Scotland) Act 2004. This Act also required NHS Boards to establish Community Health Partnerships.
Each Community Health Partnership is responsible for developing a Public Partnership Forum as one important means by which it can maintain an effective and formal dialogue with its local community.
The Scottish Government's Better Health, Better Care: Action Plan (2007) set out a vision for the NHS based on a theme of mutuality that sees the Scottish people and the staff of the NHS as partners, or co-owners in the NHS, giving people a greater say in the services they use.
Started in 2009, the Better Together surveys were issued to capture people's experiences of GP services and in-patient care. Now in the programme's third year, the inpatient survey has led to a number of changes across all health boards in Scotland supported by the programme. Next year the survey will cover another area of service.
2011 saw the implementation arm of the programme move to Healthcare Improvement Scotland, allowing targeted improvement support to be put in place using the survey results as indicators. The programme has been working closely with health boards to capture experience through a number of methodologies such as digital stories, online forms and focus groups.
To fulfil their responsibilities for public involvement, NHS Boards should routinely communicate with and involve the communities they serve. In February 2010 the Scottish Government published updated guidance on Informing, engaging and consulting people in developing health and community care services, which is supplemented by guidance produced by the Scottish Health Council. Boards should also follow the principles and practice endorsed in the National Standards for Community Engagement.
Launched in May 2010, the NHSScotland Quality Strategy states that the health service in Scotland will put people at the heart of everything it does. It establishes the commitment to ensuring that the way in which people receive healthcare is as important as how quickly they receive it. Through the implementation of the strategy, people will be encouraged to be partners in their own care and can expect to experience improvements reflecting the things they have said they want and need from their health services:
The Patient Rights (Scotland) Act 2011 gained Royal Assent on 31 March 2011 and aims to improve patients' experiences of using health services and to support people to become more involved in their health and healthcare. The provisions of the Act include:
Work is now underway to implement the Act, which will be enacted in full by October 2012.
There are a number of pieces of work ongoing which underpin the vision of a mutual NHS and will help to improve patient focus and public involvement in Scotland. These include strengthening the role of Public Partnership Forums and promoting the Participation Standard, which is used to collect systematic, comparable information on good practice that can be used to inform future development.
