Who cares? CHEX’s National Care Services consultation response
/CHEX recently submitted our response to the Scottish Government’s National Care Service consultation. We’ve summarised our response to what was a very detailed consultation document, which should hopefully get across the key points without making you have to read through the whole thing.
CHEX’s key recommendations:
The emphasis of any new model of health and social care should be on collaboration, prevention and participation.
There should be flexibility to enable communities and service users to help shape locally-appropriate services, and it should be clear how to engage with the new bodies.
Centralised data standards should focus more on measuring prevention, collaboration and participation, and not place an unnecessary burden on community sector providers.
Genuine ongoing service user involvement in design of services is needed, making more use of lived experience panels and co-production of services with service users.
We support community and service-user involvement in Community Health and Social Care Boards. These members should have voting rights and should be supported to take part effectively.
Our response is grounded in our belief that co-production and community-led approaches to health and wellbeing are key to tackling, and preventing, health inequalities. In turn, this belief is well grounded in the (formal and anecdotal) evidence we consistently hear and gather from those in our network using community-led health approaches.