National Care Service Consultation Response

Consultation Response

Credits — Common Weal Care Reform Group

Overview

Common Weal’s response to the Scottish Government’s National Care Service Consultation

Common Weal has been doing an extensive amount of work to present an approach and model for a National Care Service, explain the principles which should underpin it and describe the integrated, comprehensive way it should be experienced by citizens. This has led us to developing an ‘blueprint’ for a complete National Care Service which we shall publish shortly.

The Scottish Government’s consultation on the NCS makes it difficult to articulate this vision for care and responding to some of the questions has been difficult as they reflect preconceptions about what is being designed which have skipped a process of consideration about what it is the Government is trying to achieve.

The consultation is too light on questions of principle and philosophy and to heavy on detailed questions about existing systems, some of which we should be leaving behind.

We have sought as best as possible to provide constructive answers to the questions which have been presented and, where we think the premise of a question is wrong, have stated this.

However, a compilation of all the answers we give here would provide an insufficient picture of the vision we are developing and so should be read in conjunction with the final blueprint when it is published.

We believe that a National Care Service could be an enormous step forward in providing a genuine transformation of the quality of care services in Scotland. But getting it right means being clear from the outset the principles and approaches which will deliver that transformation. This consultation paper seems to us to have started from the wrong place.