Developing the Scottish Learning and Improvement Framework for Adult Social Care Support and Community Health (SLIF) Digital Tool

Approach to developing the SLIF digital tool and operating model

The work to develop the prototype of the SLIF digital tool and operating model was carried out between February and August 2025. Matter of Focus were commissioned to work in close collaboration with the Scottish Government and members of a cross-sector Short Life Working Group to undertake this work.

Matter of Focus approach

Matter of Focus were commissioned to support the application of an evidence-informed and practical approach to embedding outcome focused self-evaluation within public services, to the testing and operationalisation of the SLIF.

The Matter of Focus approach draws on Contribution Analysis, participatory approaches, and evidence to action. It supports organisations to track their progress to improving outcomes using the following headings:

• What we do?
• Who with?
• How they feel?
• What they learn and gain?
• What they do differently?
• What difference does it make?

Matter of Focus also brought a cloud-based software platform called ‘OutNav’ that allows organisations to embed outcome focused self-evaluation more effectively and efficiently and to share learning across organisational boundaries and work at scale. This includes uploading and linking data and evidence, review and analysis of this data, and reporting on progress. These reports include a colour-coded heat map, providing a quick view of progress. This software was used to provide an user friendly digital platform on which to build the SLIF digital tool.

Engagement

This development work was delivered through close engagement with people from HSCPs, provider organisations, public bodies, intermediaries and policy makers. The perspectives of people with lived and living experience of using services were included in this work through regular reference to the engagement data from the following reports that were collected previously for this purpose;

• Adult Social Care Support and Community Health: What it means to me. Engagement report for the Scottish Learning and Improvement Framework for Adult Social Care Support and Community Health. The ALLIANCE, and
• Scottish Learning and Improvement Framework for Adult Social Care Support and Community Health (SLIF ) co-design report.

The Short Life Working Group were closely engaged throughout the process to ‘sense check’ emerging plans, ensure alignment with, and capture learning from other work, for example, the development of the SDS self-evaluation framework.

Short Life Working Group members also provided one-to-one support and guidance on aspects of the tool. In addition, helpful feedback was obtained from the SLIF Steering Group members at key junctures in the process.

In total, 108 people were engaged in the workshops from 47 organisations and teams.

Development process

The work to develop the prototype of the SLIF digital tool and operating model included four key areas of focus:

1. Understanding the priorities for the SLIF digital tool and considerations for implementation.

2. Developing the prototype Tool and refining with engagement from diverse stakeholders.

3. Identifying and mapping the key frameworks, policy, guidance and legislation that needed to be reflected in the Tool.

4. Reviewing the Tool and seeking sign off from key policy teams.

The process undertaken to deliver each one is outlined below.

Understanding priorities and key challenges

This part of the process was carried out through a series of online workshops with people from HSCPs and provider organisations, and a series of face-to-face workshops with relevant policy leads. In these workshops, participants reflected on what success looked like for the SLIF from their perspective, potential challenges, and what needed to be in place to be effective in their respective services. Participants reviewed example models for the SLIF digital tool and ranked which potential benefits were most important to them.

Developing the prototype SLIF digital tool

Three pathways relating to the SLIF priority themes were drafted to translate the SLIF outcomes into tangible actions, these were: Supporting People, Workforce and Strategic Commissioning. These pathways were reviewed through a series of online workshops held with people working in HSCPs and provider organisations, as well as the Short Life Working Group.

The workshops took participants through the process of reviewing the draft pathways, identifying common sources of data and evidence, and reflecting on what success looked like in practice for each step of the pathways.

Through this process, it became clear that the third pathway needed to be broken down into two – one focused on IJB governance and assurance and a second focused on commissioning and procurement.

The development of the IJB pathway built directly on the work carried out by Midlothian HSCP, who have been using OutNav to underpin IJB reporting for three years. The Midlothian pathway was used as a starting point and the success criteria was refined, based on feedback from the workshops and careful review with the Planning and Performance Manager at Midlothian and the Integration Policy team.

The Commissioning and Procurement pathway was drafted with the cross-sector representatives, informed by discussions at the workshops. To date, work to develop the Ethical Commissioning Principles is still in progress. The pathway shared as part of the prototype SLIF digital tool is still in draft form and will be updated once the work on the Principles is complete.

Mapping key frameworks, guidance, policy and legislation

The process of mapping frameworks, guidance, policy and legislation built on the mapping work carried out by the SLWG. Working with key policy teams and colleagues from Care Inspectorate and Healthcare Improvement Scotland, core frameworks were identified that needed to be included and each one was worked through to see how they could best be mapped across the SLIF digital tool. A detailed list of frameworks, guidance, policy and legislation and how they have informed the Tool, is provided in Section 5 of this report.

Central to this process was working out how much detail from each framework to include, to ensure the tool was proportionate and usable at a local level. Some pathways include more detail from these frameworks than others. The benefits and limitations of taking a comprehensive approach to detailing success criteria will be explored in the testing phase.

This process also identified several additional frameworks that were either not core to the SLIF digital tool, or still in development. Information about these frameworks has been captured so that they can be included in later iterations as the tool develops.

Review and sign off from key policy teams

The four thematic pathways were reviewed by the relevant policy teams and members of the SLWG to assure that they are appropriately aligned with relevant guidance, legislation, improvement frameworks and recognised good practice. This information was brought together to develop the prototype version of the SLIF digital tool.

Learning from the process

Taking a co-production approach to the development of the draft SLIF generated rich insights into how such a framework could benefit health and social care support organisations in meeting the outcomes that matter to people.

It also raised questions and highlighted some challenges that could potentially impact effective implementation. The learning from this phase of work to operationalise the SLIF reinforced these messages. Key insights are summarised below:

The SLIF digital tool was welcomed by stakeholder groups

People from stakeholder groups in the workshops welcomed the SLIF digital tool and voiced their support for its alignment with the aspirations within it.

Stakeholders valued the explicit focus on supporting learning and improvement. They highlighted the benefits of having one place to bring together the diverse data and information captured and reported by health and social care support organisations.

Capacity and readiness for the SLIF digital tool is limited

Current capacity challenges and readiness amongst HSCPs and Providers to use new improvement tools and frameworks was consistently highlighted as an issue. Current practice in relation to data collection was voiced as being varied and diverse, with organisations all reporting current gaps in the kinds of data they would need to complete the SLIF digital tool to a high standard.

Supporting a joined-up approach to improvement

Participants from health and social care support organisatons highlighted the complexity of the current improvement and reporting landscape. Organisations raised the number of different and often un-coordinated frameworks they were required to report against.

There was general agreement that the SLIF digital tool had the potential to bring these different frameworks together creating the scaffolding for a joined-up approach to improvement. This would assist in identifying gaps in implementation or evidence, providing a robust foundation for improvement work focused on improving outcomes for people.

Streamlining reporting

Participants at the workshops were clear that the SLIF digital tool needed to support the streamlining of reporting, to support them to use it. Through discussions, two mechanisms for this emerged. Firstly, the SLIF digital tool would provide one place where all information was held, so this could easily be accessed and used to report for multiple purposes. Secondly, there is the possibility that policy and scrutiny bodies could align their reporting requests with the information routinely captured and analysed through the SLIF digital tool. This would reduce duplication and generate substantial efficiencies over time.

Digital hosting

The importance of a digital platform to host the tool was emphasised by all stakeholders. As one person put it, this is what made the tool feel different, and like it has a chance of succeeding with implementation. It was felt that there were opportunities provided by the digitally hosted Tool to support more effective sharing of learning across the system. Clarity on who had access to the data was highlighted, with local ownership felt to be an important factor in protecting the space for learning within partnerships.

The potential to use Artifical Intelligence to support learning at scale from previously hidden qualitative and informal data was seen as particularly interesting, and potentially worth further exploration.

Opportunities for local and national learning

The implementation of a digitally-hosted SLIF digital Tool offers unique opportunities to capture learning across the system about what is working well, where there are gaps, and how services are contributing to improving outcomes for people. Policy makers were particularly interested by the opportunities to explore how key data gaps might be filled including data that cannot currently be captured in a nationally consistent way.

If implemented fully, there is the opportunity for the SLIF digital tool to generate rich reports that show how key aspects of work and local policy implementation contribute to improving outcomes for people. This kind of intelligence has the potential to evidence in detail the work required to implement policy and be shared to support wider learning. It was recognised that in time this could become an important source of information for the National Care Service Advisory Board.

Shifting from performance to improvement

Across the workshops participants highlighted the importance of creating the conditions for improvement, a key pillar of the draft SLIF. This would increase the willingness to be open when things do not go well or significant improvement work is needed. Participants highlighted that people in health and social care support organisations need agreement and encouragement to share learning from failure as well as success, and that it is important that organisations own their own data and how it is used. An emphasis was placed on the the need for ongoing support around the SLIF digital tool to reinforce the messages around improvement and learning.

Ensuring the sustainability of the SLIF

The SLIF digital tool will need to be continually updated to reflect the changing legislation, guidance and good practice frameworks. It will be important to have a plan for sustaining the SLIF and to ensure it is ‘owned’ by a team who can continually liaise with policy teams to ensure these updates are made. This team will also have an important role in supporting organisations to use the SLIF digital tool and to ensure that learning and insights generated through the process are fed into future developments.

Agreed benefits

Based on these discussions, the following benefits were prioritised through the development process.

• Ensure that services and initiatives are focused on the outcomes that are important to people and capture evidence of their contribution to those outcomes. People across the system felt it was important that the tool would support the telling of rich and meaningful stories of change that support learning.
• Improve oversight and sharing of information at key junctures of the system, creating a thread from IJB strategy and progress to outcomes for people.
• Ensure services have access to a streamlined tool that integrates key policy, frameworks, legislation and guidance and can be used to report to multiple audiences.
• Report on progress and learning in ways that can be directly fed into IJB reporting and scrutiny, when that is deemed to be helpful and appropriate.

All stakeholders agreed that there is potential for the SLIF digital tool to be used to streamline reporting for providers to fulfil multiple asks. This is something that can be further explored during the planned testing phase of the prototype SLIF digital tool.

Design of the SLIF digital tool and operating model

In designing the SLIF digital tool and operating model, it has been necessary to balance the overarching aspiration to develop a flexible tool that works at every level of the system, with the pragmatic need for a tool that is easy to use. Any model also needs to provide clear benefits and be practicable for local areas to pick up and deploy.

At the core of the SLIF digital tool are four thematic pathways. Each can be used independently by specific teams, but they can also be used together to generate organisational insights, supporting learning, improvement and assurance.

Each pathway relates to one or more thematic areas within the SLIF and addresses key improvement priorities which have been shaped by people with lived and living experience of using or working in services. The pathways and the relationships between them are shown in the diagram below.

Core SLIF Tool

• IJBpathway
  • Workforce pathway
  • Ethical commissioning and procurement pathway
  • Supporting people pathway

The pathways each take the users on a journey to set out their evidence- informed activities and engagement, which are required to improve this area of practice. This will result in them being able to demonstrate how this work has contributed to improving outcomes.

Each pathway is made up of a number of ‘stepping stones’ which are underpinned by success criteria aligned to wider policy to outline what good looks like. This will support self-evaluation planning and mapping evidence sources to each ‘stepping stone’.

The success criteria were developed in discussion with policy makers and reflect core quality improvement frameworks, guidance, legislation, policy and recognised best practice principles. More information on the process of developing the success criteria and the alignment with core frameworks is presented in the next section.

A key feature of the approach is that it supports organisations to make use of diverse forms of data and information that are collected but often underutilised to support improvement. This includes:

• routinely collected local and national data
• qualitative data and feedback from people with lived and living experience of services and staff
• other forms of administrative data that are not routinely analysed
• reflective practice
• purposely collected data, for example from surveys, consultation data, and data from improvement projects

Each pathway aligns to a SLIF priority theme and has been designed for use by a clear target audience. These are listed below with links to each pathway within the SLIF digital tool. Full pathways are provided in Annex A.

Supporting people thematic pathway: this is designed to be used by service managers seeking to self-evaluate and improve direct support for people.

Workforce development thematic pathway: this has been designed to be used by service managers and workforce leads seeking to self-evaluate and improve staff support and workforce development.

IJB governance, quality and outcomes thematic pathway: the pathway was designed to be used by IJB board members and HSCP officers to underpin regular board reporting and/or support the development of the Annual Performance Report.

Commissioning and procurement thematic pathway: this pathway has been designed to be used by commissioning and procurement managers seeking to evaluate and improve commissioning and procurement practice. This pathway is in draft, pending the publication of the ethical commissioning principles and will be updated once this work is completed.

Expanding the SLIF digital tool to include additional service types

The current pathways are designed to apply across community health and social care support services. The development of the pathways has focused on referencing the diversity of frameworks, legislation and guidance relevant to the pathway. This approach has been balanced in order to support the development and testing of a usable tool, as a result not every framework or piece of legislation or guidance has been aligned.

In discussions, it became clear that some areas of practice will benefit from having their own targeted pathways. The Tool has been designed so that new pathways targeted to specific service types can be added at any time. This would enable the use of current core pathways as a starting point to ensure alignment between any new pathways developed.

Digitally Hosted Tool

The SLIF digital tool has been designed to be digitally hosted. To best support the use of the SLIF digital tool, having it being owned by a single team is advisable. This will enable consistent management of updates, version control and safe access management.

This team will coordinate pathway updates to all organisations ensuring that all users are working with the most up to date version of the SLIF digital tool.

Each organisation using the SLIF digital tool will have a secure space to work, with control over access to the data and content within each pathway. Within the digitally hosted tool, people from multiple partner organisations can work together, supporting effective information sharing across organisational boundaries, underpinned by data sharing agreements as appropriate.

Using the SLIF digital tool in practice

Using a pathway

Teams or services using the SLIF digital tool will need to select the relevant pathway for their work and identify a resource to lead on using the pathway to assess progress. The guidance for use is currently presented in draft form and will be updated through the testing process, incorporating learning from practice.

Each of the four pathways are broken down into a series of ‘stepping stones’. Each stepping stone contains a list of success criteria that prompt the team to reflect on what good looks like for that part of the change process, and the extent to which they are realising this in practice.

Within the Tool, teams can select a stepping stone, review the success criteria related to it, link and upload relevant data and evidence and record a narrative summary of progress, highlights and areas for improvement.

For each stepping stone, teams can assess whether they think their work represents great progress, some progress or low progress, and how confident they are in the evidence underpinning this assessment. This information can be pulled out into a visual one-page heat map which provides an accessible overview of progress. An example of this from the Workforce pathway is shown below.

What we do

1.1: Invest in and prioritise learning and development opportunities, training and supervision for staff Progress: Great Confidence: High

1.2: Develop and monitor implementation of a workforce plan to ensure appropriately trained, qualified and experienced staff are in place Progress: Great Confidence: High

1.3: Embed systems and processes to support improvement and innovation programmes Progress: Great Confidence: High

Who with

2.1: Health and social care workforce Progress: Some Confidence: High

2.2: Health and social care leadership Progress: Great Confidence: Some

How they feel

3.1: H&SC team feel valued, respected, empowered, skilled, confident and supported to provide a high-quality, safe and human rights-based care Progress: Some Confidence: High

3.2: Informed, supported and able to make effective decisions Progress: Some Confidence: Low

3.3: Empowered, enabled and supported to continuously improve services Progress: Some Confidence: Low

What they learn and gain

4.1: Staff develop the knowledge, skills, competencies and confidence to develop and deliver safe, effective high-quality care, and support Progress: Great Confidence: High

4.2: Staff gain opportunities to do rewarding work and develop their careers in ways that are meaningful to them Progress: Some Confidence: Some

4.3: Staff understand what matters to people and how this influences their needs and outcomes Progress: Some Confidence: High

What they do differently

5.1: Staff work together across system and organisations providing high-quality, safe, coordinated care and support Progress: Great Confidence: Some

5.2: Staff are supported to plan, implement and evaluate improvement and innovation in their care and support Progress: Some Confidence: Some

5.3: Staff are able to maintain their own health and wellbeing in the workplace (including in times of change and pressure) Progress: Low Confidence: Some

5.4: Staff and leaders implement processes that improve the quality of care and support Progress: Some Confidence: High

What difference does this make?

6.1: The adult social care support and community health workforce is thriving Progress: Some Confidence: Some

Capturing organisational insights

The SLIF digital tool pathways have been developed using one overarching framework. This means that insights generated from each of the Supporting People, Workforce and Commissioning pathways all feed directly into the IJB pathway. This allows for a clear line of sight from the contribution of individual services to improving outcomes for people to progress towards strategic aims and delivery of the National Health and Wellbeing Outcomes.

Where multiple teams are using the SLIF digital tool, the HSCP will be able to access insights from key elements of these pathways, prompt and share tasks and automatically aggregate key information across multiple teams using the same pathway.

Using the SLIF digital tool for reporting

Teams using the SLIF digital tool to assess progress against one or more pathways can generate reports from within the Tool to support internal learning and governance and external reporting requirements. The content of reports will include:

• Synthesis of key qualitative and quantitative data, insights and reflections from the team on progress and areas for improvement
• Feedback from people with lived and living experience
• Case studies of good practice and the colour-coded heat maps summarizing progress

All the information sitting in the Tool can be collated in flexible ways to support both internal learning and more formal reporting. In some instances, teams may wish to run a report directly from the Tool. In others, the SLIF digital tool will act as a repository of well synthesized information that is readily available for external reporting.