National Care Service - making sure my voice is heard: regional forums - findings summary

Introduction

Throughout the summer of 2023, we held a series of regional events across different communities in Scotland as part of our on-going work to co-design the National Care Service. These took place in places from Stranraer to Shetland and were chosen to ensure we worked with both rural (mainland and island) areas as well as town and urban areas.

We also ran online events for people who could not attend in person. This report is a summary of what we heard from people and what we will do next to continue co- designing the National Care Service with the people and organisations who need or deliver community health and social care support.

At each of these regional events we ran three co-design theme sessions as well as more informal drop-in lunchtime sessions. In some areas we also went out to local organisations to run additional events on their premises.

The sessions were all aimed at people:

• with lived experience of community health and social care support
• with lived experience of working (in a paid or an unpaid/carer capacity) or volunteering in community health and social care
• or who have an interest in community health and social care in Scotland

The total number of attendees at these events was 606.

The co-design sessions related to one of the five current co-design themes of the NCS:

• Information sharing
• Keeping care support local (part 1 local services and part 2 community health care)
• Making sure your voice is heard
• Valuing the workforce
• Realising rights and responsibilities

The first part of each session involved sharing our current understanding of:

• People’s current experiences of health and social care
• Where people felt the changes to community health and social care in the National Care Service should be focussed.

We wanted to check with people if our understanding was right and if we had missed asking any important questions.

In the second part of each session we then asked people to share their ideas about how to solve the problems or make the changes we had discussed in the first part of the session.

This report is a summary of the key things that we heard from people. We will use the full detailed feedback we have gathered to develop further co-design work with people and organisations over the next 18 months, as we move towards the final decisions about the design of the National Care Service.

We will also run additional sessions targeted at children and young people, as well as at people from groups who we know are currently under-represented in this work. This is to ensure that the National Care Service reflects and meets the needs of all the different kinds of people who need to use and work in delivering (whether paid, unpaid carers or volunteers) community health and social care support.