National Care Service: Scottish Learning and Improvement Framework for Adult Social Care Support and Community Health (SLIF) co-design report

About the Scottish Learning and Improvement Framework

The Independent Review of Adult Social Care (IRASC) said there needs to be a new approach to improving outcomes and experiences of adult social care and support for:

• people who use services
• unpaid carers
• the workforce

The Scottish Government worked with partners to co-produce a draft Scottish Learning and Improvement Framework for Adult Social Care Support and Community Health (SLIF). The SLIF sets out the vision and agreed priorities for improvement in following areas of care and support:

• adult social care
• community health
• social work

Representatives from agencies that provide adult social care, community health and social work these 3 areas made up the multi-agency steering group to help develop the SLIF. This steering group is co-chaired by:

• the Scottish Government
• Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA)
• Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers (SOLACE)
• National Health Service (NHS)

The SLIF supports a new approach to improvement. Building quality and learning into the system and tracking improvement by the outcomes that matter to people.

Desk research

People with lived and living experience have been included throughout the development of the draft SLIF. The work was based on:

• reviewing 4 existing engagement reports
• impact assessments

Where the reviews and impact assessment had highlighted gaps, we had follow-up conversations with those groups.

Using these findings the steering group developed outcomes for tracking improvements in the adult social care support and community health system. The main outcomes are:

• people, including unpaid carers, are enabled to live a good life as independently as possible, in a place of their choosing
• the adult social care support and community health workforce is thriving

Following the development of these outcomes further engagement work was carried out, with focus group sessions hosted by the Health and Social Care Alliance and organisations who support people who may not normally be able to access or engage with government. This explored:

• what achieving these outcomes would look like in people’s lives
• how people would know progress was being made

The findings from this engagement are summarised is this report and in a separate report by the Health and Social Care Alliance.