Collaborative Communities
The Collaborative Communities team support the development of integrated health and social care approaches that are centred around communities.
Policy drivers
The changing legislative and policy backdrop around health and social care in Scotland has developed a strong drive around empowering individuals and communities towards having real choice in how their health and care needs are met. The challenge now is to change this narrative into actions.
The challenges
Within an integrated environment, there are significant challenges to transforming services with many of these included within the following themes:
- Leadership
- Culture
- Regulation
- Systems and processes
- Workforce development
As many of these challenges are system wide they can only truly be resolved through collaboration across the public, third and independent sectors, people and communities.
Why work in a collaborative way
The vision for collaboration alongside increasing flexibility already exists within the system, with emerging conversations around how to ‘change the ask and change the offer’. Shifting away from traditional models of service provision allows greater involvement of the third and independent sectors, along with exploring wider assets within communities.
By encouraging innovation around commissioning practice there is an opportunity for development of a wider market that allows people to have more choice in the services and support they receive.
The Collaborative Communities team is supporting Health and Social Care Partnerships (HSCPs) and other organisations to explore:
- How might we better support work being done by communities?
- How might we enable innovation to flourish within communities?
- What is the best way to approach funding small scale initiatives?
- How do we give people choice to access the support that they need?
Here's a summary video about our community led support work in Scotland:
Our support
The Collaborative Communities team are working in a number of areas to test different approaches. This includes:
- working with three HSCPs in Scotland to apply and embed a service design approach to their learning disability day support services
- partnering with the National Development Team for Inclusion to support nine HSCPs in Scotland to implement and embed Community Led Support
- supporting HSCPs to develop collaborative commissioning practices with the third and independent sectors
- working with a range of community organisations to develop new, flexible models of care and support
- exploring pathways for delivering services and support for carers to promote the implementation of the Carers Act.
Within this we:
- provide guidance/coaching on developing outcome-based and collaborative commissioning practices
- highlight innovative models of practice
- provide independent facilitation of local events
- create connections between those working on common issues
- are a critical friend and offer expert advice to HSCPs in development of outcome-based commissioning framework specifications.