NHS Scotland operational improvement plan

Overview

The NHS requires significant renewal and reform to ensure that we have a sustainable health service, given the scale of growing demand it faces. On 4 June 2024 the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care set out a new vision for health and social care services in Scotland to address this challenge and give focus to the reform work. In summary, this vision is to ‘enable people to live longer, healthier and more fulfilling lives’, and it requires a focus on prevention, early intervention and quality services.

On 27 January 2025, the First Minister described plans to renew our health service and deliver the change that people in Scotland need. This Operational Improvement Plan is the first component, to be followed by publication of a population health framework and a health and social care service renewal framework. Together these plans will progress reform to ensure long-term sustainability, reduce health inequalities, further harness the benefits of digital technology, and improve population health outcomes in Scotland. They will set out how we will plan our services for our whole population over the short, medium and longer term.

We are co-developing the population health framework with COSLA and in collaboration with Public Health Scotland, NHS Directors of Public Health and other local, regional and national partners. We will publish it in spring 2025. The framework will detail a long-term, cross-government and cross-sector approach to primary prevention of ill health, i.e. how we support people to live healthy and fulfilling lives and stopping health problems arising in the first place.

We will publish our health and social care service renewal framework in late June 2025. It will build on the vision for reform and set out the strategic policy intent for health and social care in Scotland for the medium to longer term.

The Operational Improvement Plan

This Operational Improvement Plan builds on health boards’ own delivery planning for 2025-26. It describes a number of commitments and actions across NHS Scotland that are needed to improve the experience of patients.

The plan brings focus to four critical areas that the Government is committed to delivering, to help protect the quality and safety of care, supported by the increased investment for health and social care in the 2025-26 Scottish Budget:

• improving access to treatment
• shifting the balance of care
• improving access to health and social care services through digital and technological innovation
• prevention – ensuring we work with people to prevent illness and more proactively meet their needs

The NHS Recovery Plan 2021-26, published in August 2021, set out ambitions and actions over five years to address the backlog in care and drive the recovery and renewal of NHS services. We will align our reporting on this Operational Improvement Plan with the final reporting for the NHS Recovery Plan.

NHS workforce support

As with any operational improvements across the NHS, staff are at the heart of delivery and first and foremost recognition is required of the heightened pressures with which staff are dealing every day. Support for staff and enabling their voice in the planning of these improvements as well as their delivery is therefore critical.

The Government has engaged staff-side and professional bodies in finalising this plan and have welcomed the constructive input. We will of course build on that engagement as we move into implementation.

This plan continues our increased investment in the workforce. As well as the increases to boards’ core budgets for 2025-26, much of the additional investment, such as the £100 million for waiting times, is targeted for extra recruitment, with assurance also provided to boards on recurring funding.

We will work closely with staff-side and professional bodies at a national level and with individual boards to support the right conversations, strategically and locally, to empower and engage the workforce as we move into implementation.