ihub response to COVID-19
To prioritise the capacity of health and social care services, Healthcare Improvement Scotland has taken the decision to adapt our normal ways of working to provide support to Scotland's health and social care services. This action is supported by Scottish Government.
This is an unprecedented situation requiring unusual measures, and it is important that we support health and social care services in maintaining essential work.
To support this, a number of changes are being made. These changes are based on what an increasingly pressurised health and social care system will benefit most from, and to maintain our statutory duties. For example:
- The ihub is flexing its resources to directly support the health and social care system to develop and implement changes to services in response to COVID-19.
- We will be continuing with our regulatory work for Independent Healthcare, adapting our approach as appropriate.
- Patient safety, responding to concerns/complaints and Board escalation procedure will continue to be priorities.
- We'll continue to put guidance and resources into the system for key issues such as infection control and Sepsis for example.
- Other critical business work such as the preparation of the end of year accounts will also carry on.
The duration of these measures is unknown and we will provide further updates in due course.
ihub update
At the ihub, we have already refocused a number of our programmes as follows:
- We are supporting the Near Me roll out across primary care, obstetrics, community midwifery and mental health. Near Me roll out in paediatrics will follow shortly. We are working in partnership with the Scottish Government’s Near Me team to support this. Find out more about Near Me.
- Our Living Well in Communities programme is focusing on supporting ACP implementation; with a particular focus on supporting individuals who are frail. It will also be providing support for Hospital at Home implementation.
- Our Person-centred Health and Care programme is collating and sharing examples of how care staff are demonstrating new ways to communicate compassionately in COVID-19 wards when the usual ways of interacting with patients, and their families, are not possible. Visit our Compassionate Care web section.
- We are supporting health and social care services to rapidly adapt in order to mitigate the challenges presented by COVID-19. We explore and share ideas, insights and examples of positive emerging practice from across Scotland. Visit our HSC Learning web section.
- Our Strategic Planning portfolio is reprioritising existing bespoke support towards COVID-19 resilience planning in IJBs.
We are currently liaising with our stakeholders to identify if there are other areas where we can help support the system in preparing and responding to COVID-19. If you think there is something we should be doing please don’t hesitate to get in contact either through your ihub contact or via info@ihub.scot.
Please note that the decision to suspend a number of our current national improvement programmes does not mean that associated work should automatically be suspended locally. That decision should be made by individual organisations through internal governance processes. If work is suspended locally, we advise consideration is given to what information needs to be recorded to make it easy to reinstate it in the future.
Guidance document
Here is our guidance document to help organisations who are temporarily suspending their QI programmes.
If you are involved in any of our improvement work and require specific information about it, please get in touch with your ihub contact or email info@ihub.scot.