Activities

​On behalf of both service providers and people who use services, Scottish Care highlights current concerns outlining partnership proposals for the way forward for care and support services, Making the case for care is now a matter of real urgency.

Scotland faces a potential crisis in the provision of care and support services over the coming years, as competing pressures begin to bite:

• Increasing levels of demand and complexity of need

• Severe constraints in public sector finance

• Increased cost of care and support delivery

• Desire to shift the balance of care and support away from the acute sector

• Maintaining the commitment to personalisation and choice

• The drive to improve outcomes and quality

• The need to develop new models of service delivery

• Creating a system of proportionate regulation

• Recruiting, training and shaping the required workforce.

These pressures are likely to impact most clearly in relation to the care and support of older people, but will equally apply to other areas of social care provision such as mental health, physical disability and housing support services. Meeting the challenges and avoiding crisis will require:

• Making full use of existing resources as the hub of future service provision

• Moving away from the current reliance on high cost in-patient provision and high cost local authority run services

• Building on the established partnerships with the private and voluntary sectors to develop new capacity, new models of service delivery and a shift in the balance of care and support

• Radical change in how care and support services are planned, funded and commissioned

• Leveraging change through the targeted use of funding and investment

• Ensuring a sustainable resource base which will allow for the continued delivery of high quality care.

Social and health care provision needs to be jointly planned, commissioned and funded by the social and health care authorities, as is the case in the majority of countries.