Chamber and committees

Thank you, convener. I welcome the witnesses to the committee.

This question is for both of you. Has integration led to more collaborative working across the public sector, and between it and third sector organisations? Has that helped to improve outcomes for children and young people?

I thank the witnesses for coming. I will direct my question to Vicky Irons first, but everyone is welcome to come in.

We have talked a lot about consistency and quality, and we have highlighted quite a lot of challenges to joint working as well as the real improvements that have been going on in partnership working. We have heard that the key to success is collaboration, which improves outcomes.

Central to Derek Feeley’s recommendations was an NCS with a co-design aspect that looked to fully involve not just social workers and health professionals but people receiving care and the organisations that support them, including adults, children, families, the third sector, advocacy and people with disabilities. Those recommendations were in response to overwhelming public support for that approach.

Could care boards—which would include members with lived experience as well as social workers and health professionals, for instance—be an opportunity to expand on the success of joint working to include people with lived experience in the on-going design and delivery of services to ensure that we achieve the outcomes that matter most to people not just now but in the future? Surely the proposal is about collaboration. It is about the idea that bringing in the lived experience would add to the collaboration that you already have and would make services better.

I said that it was directed to Vicky Irons initially.

You have talked a bit about the challenges. We heard concerns from Ross McGuffie that, if adult services are part of the national care service, having children’s services sitting outwith it could create problems with the approach to whole-family support. He spoke about services perhaps being shoehorned in later to assist in a system that is really built around adult services. What are your thoughts on that?

Martin, do you believe that the national care service presents an opportunity for third sector organisations, as well as people who have lived experience, to work right at the centre of care boards and to be part of the co-design process, examining new policy and delivery so that people get the outcomes that matter to them?

I want to briefly pick up on a wee point that Kay McVeigh made about staff feeling that they do not know what will happen or where they will be with their terms and conditions. I thought that TUPE meant that people’s terms and conditions had to be at least as good as their previous ones.

Thank you, convener—I am back again.

Alison Bavidge is absolutely spot on. We all know that data drives what we do, so data collection is hugely important.

When we look at outcomes, the voices of professionals are often right up there. How can we ensure that we also hear the voices of those who receive care and services, because sometimes their view can be a wee bit different? It is about having parity.

Cara Stevenson spoke earlier about the fact that care workers are at breaking point—you were passionate and quite emotional about it—because they have faced an incredibly difficult time. Nurses are facing an equally tough time. However, nurses have a certain image, because people appreciate that nursing is a real vocation and that it is a very skilled job. There is a huge amount of appreciation for nurses, which social care workers, perhaps, do not always get.

Therefore, I am interested in what the benefits and risks might be of a prerequisite that prospective social care staff have qualifications. I am also interested in how we might attract young people into the workforce and show them that it can be a worthwhile and enjoyable job.

That is really interesting, because one of the points that the people whom I spoke to yesterday made was that, last winter, they had one of the lowest delayed discharge rates in Scotland and they felt that data sharing was a huge part of the reason for it.

Colin Poolman’s comments on what else we could put in the bill were also interesting. Is there anything else that witnesses would like to be in the bill to help multidisciplinary working to become more effective, particularly in relation to early intervention and preventative care?

That is helpful to know.