Healthcare Improvement Scotland is an organisation with many parts and one purpose – to help make the quality of health and social care better for people across Scotland.

Our budget for 2019–2020 is approximately £30 million and we have nearly 500 staff, working mostly from two national offices and a network of local offices across the country.

As this plan illustrates, we carry out a wide range of activities to serve our overall purpose. Our programme of work supports the delivery of Making Care Better, our organisation’s strategy for 2017–2022 and, in turn, the Scottish Government’s Health and Social Care Delivery Plan and the published Scottish Government Programme for Government 2018–2019.

As set out in our strategy, the main ways in which we believe we can make the biggest difference are through our five strategic priorities:

• Enabling people to make informed decisions about their care and treatment.
• Helping health and social care organisations to redesign and continuously improve services.
• Provide evidence and share knowledge that enables people to get the best out of the services they use and helps services improve.
• Provide quality assurance that gives people confidence in the services and supports providers to improve.
• Making the best use of resources, we aim to ensure every pound invested in our work adds value to the care people receive.

We are working in an increasingly collaborative way across our organisation, with the aim of maximising the impact we have on improving the quality of health and social care across Scotland.

We believe that how we work with others to deliver our work programme is as important as what we focus our delivery on. In line with wider NHS values all of our work has our organisational values embedded within its delivery and development. Our values are:

• Care and compassion
• Dignity and respect
• Openness, honesty and responsibility, and
• Quality and teamwork.