Our approach

The Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act 2014 sets the legislative framework for integrating adult health and social care. 

Integrating health and social care services is important to ensure that people have quick access to the range of services and support they need, that their care feels seamless to them and that they experience good outcomes and high standards of support. This is particularly vital for the increasing numbers of people with multiple and complex long-term conditions in Scotland. 

Since April 2017, the Care Inspectorate and Healthcare Improvement Scotland have had joint statutory responsibility to inspect and support improvement in the strategic planning and commissioning of integrated approaches. 

In 2019, the Ministerial Strategic Group (MSG) for Health and Community Care asked us to further develop our joint inspections to focus on how integration impacts on people’s outcomes, to consider the performance of the whole health and social care partnership  (‘the partnership’) and to ensure a balanced focus across health and social care provision. 

In response to the MSG recommendation, the Care Inspectorate and Healthcare Improvement Scotland have reviewed our joint inspection methodology to answer the following question: 

“How effectively is the partnership working together, strategically and operationally, to deliver seamless services that achieve good health and wellbeing outcomes for adults?” 

In order to address the question over the broad spectrum of adult health and social care services, we will conduct a rolling programme of themed inspections, looking at how integration of services positively supports people’s experiences and outcomes. It’s important to note that these thematic inspections are not considering the quality of specialist care for each care group but are simply a means of identifying groups of people with similar or shared experiences through which to understand if health and social care integration arrangements are resulting in good outcomes. In this way, we’re looking at integration through the lens of different care groups which, taken together, will in time build a picture of what is happening more broadly in health and social care integration and how this is experienced by people and the outcomes achieved. 

How we do it 

Our inspections last for a number of months. We work closely with the partnership to co-ordinate our inspection activities. 

We have a range of ways to gather information that will help us to assess how to what degree integrated services are helping to improve outcomes for people experiencing care. These include: 

  • asking for information from the partnership 
  • speaking to people experiencing care 
  • speaking with staff, managers and leaders across the partnership 
  • reading people’s records. 

We communicate regularly with the partnership and keep them up to date with our findings. 

After the inspection, we publish a report about our findings on the websites of the Care Inspectorate and Healthcare Improvement Scotland. The report explains what we have found, identifies strengths and points out areas that could be improved. We agree an Improvement plan with the partnership to address those areas. 

Getting involved 

The voices of people experiencing care are at the centre of our inspection. We will take as many opportunities as we can to involve people and talk to them about their experiences of health and social care services. 

We have developed an engagement framework to support all our engagement activity. The framework sets out 12 statements about positive outcomes and experiences that we will speak with people about. 

More information