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

What’s next

The Scottish Government remains committed to improving quality, fairness and consistency across the social care system.

The Care Reform (Scotland) Bill (formerly known as the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill) passed Stage 3 in the Scottish Parliament in June 2025. This is the final stage in the Parliament process.

The Bill has also got formal agreement from the King, called Royal Assent, and has now been enshrined in law as an Act.

This work is a part of the wider, meaningful changes we are bringing to strengthen social care services across Scotland. Helping to improve the lives of those who access care, their loved ones and our valued workforce. 

We will be doing extra work with people from groups we know are currently underrepresented in our work so far.

We have established an interim NCS Advisory Board which met for the first time on May 2025. This means that we can work on improvements quicker.

Soon a permanent board will be formed. A fair and open appointments process will be designed to recruit an independent chair and individual members for the full board to continue the work of the interim Board. This process will be informed by the outputs of the co-design work that we carried out. We will ensure that the right support is available to ensure that all members can take part equally.

All members will be responsible for making sure that people with experience of integrated health and social care services inform the Board’s work.

What’s next for the Scottish Learning and Improvement Framework

We're developing a practical tool to help local areas put the SLIF into action. We’re working with Matter of Focus and local partners to design this tool.

The tool will support local areas to use the SLIF to:

• track their progress against the improvement outcomes
• show what impact their efforts are making to people’s lives

The insights from this report, about what progress looks like to people, will be built into the tool. This will allow us to measure whether the system is improving people lives in a way that matters to them.