Interim National Care Service Advisory Board: Advice to Scottish Ministers and Council Leaders - Getting it Right for Everyone
The Interim National Care Service Advisory Board identified Getting it Right for Everyone as a priority theme for their consideration. The advice and recommendations have been prepared for Scottish Ministers and Council Leaders to help drive improvement and ensure consistency across Scotland.
Risks/challenges associated with advice
The interim Board’s advice on embedding GIRFE does not introduce new risks but may highlight existing ones, especially in areas that already have capacity, change readiness, organisational culture or consistency of adoption issues.
Risk/challenge: Resource and capacity strain: Additional workload for GIRFE leads and staff may impact frontline capacity.
Implementation costs: Training and transformation activities could increase short-term costs.
Response/mitigation: The interim Board recognises the need for phased implementation approach. The GIRFE policy team encourages and supports local areas to minimise resource and capacity challenges by building on best practice.
Use of existing reporting processes should avoid new costly systems.
Risk/challenge: Change fatigue: Staff may experience resistance or burnout due to multiple concurrent change programmes.
Response/mitigation: The GIRFE policy team is available to provide formal and informal support to areas and provide tailored support where requested, in addition to support through the GIRFE Collaborative Learning Community.
Case practice examples should continue to be shared to assist learning and provide assurance that a GIRFE approach can improve operational efficiency.
Risk/challenge: Variation in local adoption: Inconsistent interpretation of GIRFE guidance may lead to uneven implementation.
Response/mitigation: The interim Board understands that shared resources will be made available in 2026, including tools, templates and plans. Local areas will be enabled to adapt these to their local situation, while remaining true to the GIRFE model.
NES Learning resources and the GIRFE Toolkit are available nationally to support practitioners and professionals. The interim Board understands these resources will be iteratively updated as learning is captured from areas embedding GIRFE.
Risk/challenge: Reporting Burden: Even light-touch reporting potentially adds administrative tasks for organisations.
Response/mitigation: The interim Board notes the role of the Social Care Data and Intelligence Programme Board, in working through all partners to rationalise and maximise the value of social care data collections, in line with the ambitions of the Verity House Agreement. It is strongly advised that the plans for initial light touch reporting and any longer-term reporting approach are developed as part of these wider efforts.
Risk/challenge: Dependency on National Support: Over-reliance on SG GIRFE team could slow local adoption.
Response/mitigation: The interim Board notes the wide-ranging support resources and community networks in development, which will support local areas to make significant progress without recourse to a central team.
Risk/challenge: Professional standards: some professionals may cite their professional standards as a reason for deprioritising a GIRFE approach.
Response/mitigation: The interim Board recognises that different professions will have different risk tolerances, and work to different sets of professional standards. GIRFE brings together the full team around the person, prompting focused conversations about what individuals need and want. These conversations provide an opportunity to identify and test out risks and issues of different options, and ensure full understanding of the impact of any negative outcomes of treatment choices. Shared decision making and personalised care are central to GIRFE and align with professional standards.
The interim Board considers that these risks are considerably outweighed by the risk of failure to embed a GIRFE approach across the system:
- increased social/clinical care risks
- fragmented care, poor experiences and outcomes for individuals and a failure to meet holistic needs
- a disjointed system, full of duplication, missed savings opportunities and lost benefits of transformation
- damage to professionals’ wellbeing and morale, through working in a systems-led way, unable to reflect personal values
The interim Board’s advice is designed to mitigate these risks.
Contact
Email: NCSAdvisoryBoard@gov.scot