It is important to highlight the good work that is being done in care at home and housing support services across Scotland and I am pleased to support the inaugural Home Care Day and, in particular, to be initiating today with a focus on high quality care.

We all recognise how important it is to enhance lives and improve wellbeing for a wide range of people. It is also important that we can enable and support people to live well in their own homes and be part of their local community.

High quality care is about listening to the needs of the people we care for and about providing the best possible experience. High quality care is about supporting improvement and working in partnership to support new models of care. And, for the Care Inspectorate, high quality care is about working with providers and many others, to provide public assurance to people and communities.

Scotland’s new Health and Social Care Standards enable us to achieve this. Rather than being relevant (just) in regulated services, the new Health and Social Care Standards are relevant across all health and social care provision. They are significantly more rights-based and outcome-focused than the standards which were developed some 15 years ago. The keen focus on human rights and wellbeing is one of the features that make the Health and Social Care Standards unique and innovative, something that will support good care.

As the Care Inspectorate develops new approaches to scrutiny and improvement, the Health and Social Care Standards will play an important role in our wider work on inspecting care and reporting on the difference it is making for people. We will use the new standards to continue to champion high quality care wherever we find it and to work closely with providers and support them to improve, where needed.

We are currently developing a new inspection framework which will use the standards to set out the impact we expect care to have, and the key enablers of good care we expect to be in place. Our inspection framework will be clearer about what we expect to see in different service types and will be capable of being used for self-evaluation by care providers too.

I am sure that you will now be getting familiar with these new standards and thinking about what these mean for you, those that you care for and overall quality and service provision. Our expectation is that from April 2018, all care services, social work services, local authorities, integration joint boards, community planning partnerships and community justice authorities will take account of the new standards when planning, commissioning and delivering high quality services. To support good care, over the next year, we will continue to work with providers, commissioners and Scotland’s committed and skilled social care workforce.

The new Standards will form the basis of our future inspections but they are not just designed for scrutiny. They are explicitly designed to support the way services are planned, commissioned, and delivered, and to be used in supporting improvement too.

To me, the Standards will support high quality care by helping to reinforce that assessment of quality is not be whether a minimum standard is met but whether the experience and outcomes for people are positive. I would like our partnership working to enable services to creatively solve problems and to improve through innovation.

I hope Home Care Day will be a huge success and I will be following today’s discussions with interest.

Karen Reid
Chief Executive, Care Inspectorate

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