Chamber and committees

Thank you for joining us this morning. I am really interested in co-production and regional forums. Have any of you or your staff been along to any of the regional forums? It would be really interesting to hear about any feedback and learning from that. What are your thoughts on co-production and co-design and how they can achieve transformational change?

Last year, the Scottish Government said that co-design would produce a charter of rights, a national complaints process and an electronic health and care record, but not services. At this point, are you clear which aspects of the national care service are being co-designed, who will be involved, and when and how they will be involved?

That is a great example. Thank you very much.

Good morning, minister. You have touched on some of this already, but what is the Scottish Government doing to support local authorities and health and social care partnerships with the current and immediate issues in social care and to support provision, including, for example, on staffing and capacity?

You are absolutely right. I am sure that we can all agree on how valuable social care is, and the pathways that you spoke about are so important, too.

I would like to ask you about the end of life. Not everyone will recover, and a substantial portion of the current health and social care budget is spent on caring for people who are approaching the end of life. At a previous committee meeting, Mark Hazelwood, the chief executive of the Scottish Partnership for Palliative Care, called for changes to the principles of the bill to include end-of-life care. How will the national care service be developed to respond to the growing need for palliative and end-of-life care? How are co-designed forums informing that approach?

Are you getting the feedback to help to inform the charter through the national care service forums or is there more work to be done in that area?

Could I ask you, Niamh, to touch on keeping people’s experiences at the centre, as well?

That leads on to my next question. How can the interdependencies between various spending areas be better taken into account when making budget systems and looking at performance frameworks?

Talking about that final year of life, there are also all the hospital admissions and so on. We are always talking about bringing down the number of admissions, but obviously that is something that is not quite so movable.

Many of my questions have been answered or touched on. We have heard about the care and wellbeing dashboard. We hear a lot that short-term targets can drive decision making, but I am interested in longer-term objectives. What can we do to encourage setting of budgets with that in mind?