NHS Scotland operational improvement plan
Actions to improve specific aspects of NHS Scotland delivery, building on NHS boards’ own delivery planning for 2025 to 2026. This is the first of three documents on the Government's approach to health and social care renewal.
Foreword
The First Minister set out this Government’s ambition for renewing our NHS in a speech on 27 January. To deliver against that ambition and ensure a more accessible, more person-centred NHS we must reduce the immediate pressures across the NHS, shift the balance of care from acute services to the community, and use digital and technological innovation to improve access to care.
This will require a process of reform and renewal delivered in partnership with others that reduces immediate pressures across the NHS, addresses waiting times, moves to a ‘digital front door’ approach, and intervenes earlier and prevents illnesses. It follows years of Westminster austerity, the effects of the pandemic and rising costs due to inflation.
In setting out the next phase of renewal and reform, it is important for me to emphasise the fundamental value of our NHS and its staff – and I will continue to do so as we proceed. We committed to setting out more detail in three documents – firstly in this Operational Improvement Plan, then in a population health framework later in the spring, and lastly in a medium-term approach to health and social care reform before Parliament’s summer recess.
Accordingly, this Operational Improvement Plan is focused on the short term. Realistic as well as ambitious, it describes how the specific commitments outlined in January will be delivered and builds on health boards’ own delivery planning to improve delivery across NHS Scotland. For all these commitments, the workforce must be supported and enabled with staff involved where possible in local discussions on planning and delivery.
I should stress that this is not a stand-alone plan for the NHS. Instead it builds on the delivery plans of the 22 health boards, prioritising how services will be improved across NHS Scotland.
The relentless focus on delivery through this plan typifies the ‘coordinated action and strategic investment’ which the First Minister highlighted in his speech. I thank all those involved in supporting these commitments and delivering quality care across our NHS.
Neil Gray
Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care