Scottish Health Information Integrity Strategy
Sets out the framework for safe, coherent, evidence-based and ethical approaches to address false and misleading health information.
Why Now?
Many lessons have been learned from the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is likely that a similar event will occur again. How we prepare for this now will play an important part in how we face such a threat tomorrow.
The Scottish Government Standing Committee on Pandemic Preparedness (SCoPP) published its final report ‘Pandemic Ready: Safeguarding Our Future Through Preparedness’ in November 2024.[33] Recommendations to prepare for another pandemic were made, including the need to have processes in place to deal with false health information (Recommendation 5B):
- A rapid response mechanism to identify and address the cross-cutting challenges posed by misinformation around pandemics.
- To build Scotland’s resilience to misinformation and the impacts of this on pandemic preparedness and response.
These make clear that there is a need for a formal capability which goes beyond provision of trusted information. Rather, institutions which provide health information must also be able to reactively respond in a safe and ethical manner to false information which is causing harm to the public’s health. With growing interest in across the UK and internationally, evidence in this field is rapidly evolving.
Contact
Email: DGHSCIIRU@gov.scot