Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) will soon begin to review our current Strategic Plan, which will help us develop a new Plan. This will see us use a more co-produced approach, with closer engagement with partners in the third and independent sectors.

Our Strategic Plan provides staff working within the HSCP, Local Authority and Health Board partners and members of the public with information on how the HSCP will take forward the priorities of the Integration Joint Board (IJB) and the wider community to improve the health and social care outcomes of people in the city. 

We’re required by law to carry out a review of the Plan, taking into account the views of the people and communities across the city, and those of organisations and groups representing those people and communities. Normally, the engagement process would already be under way to review our Plan and develop a replacement Plan in time for March 2022, when our current plan expires. 

Currently, we’re not operating under normal circumstances. As well as the impact of the withdrawal from the European Union, the country is entering a period of recovery following the trauma and impact from the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to that, following the recent Scottish Parliamentary elections, the Scottish Government is developing its priorities for the next parliamentary term and this will undoubtedly have an impact on the future of health and social care. 

Susanne Millar, Chief Officer said: “We don't think it’s fair to be asking people across our city to tell us over a short period of time what they feel the priorities for health and social care should be when there’s so much uncertainty and change on the horizon. We’ve taken the decision with our IJB, after consulting with our main planning groups (which include members of the public and community organisations), to extend the current Strategic Plan for 12 months, starting in March 2022. This means that from April 2022 the existing Plan will continue to be in place. 

“But we're not just looking to extend the timescale of the current Plan. We also want to change the way people feed into the review process and affect the new Plan. We're going to use the extra time we now have to plan how we engage with our key stakeholders to ensure we understand the best way to enable them to get involved with the review of the Plan and provide them with the support they need to remove any barriers to engaging with us".

The idea is to develop a new Strategic Plan that will take effect from March 2023. Between now and then we’ll engage with people and organisations across the city to ask what they think. We think this will allow time for some of the things we don't currently know to become clearer, so that when we ask their opinion, they’ll have more and better information on which to base their views. We hope this will avoid us having to ask the same questions more than once if things were to change mid-way through the engagement process. 
 
Wherever possible we’ll support organisations to carry out the engagement work so that people can engage with organisations and workers who they’re familiar with rather than with staff from the HSCP, if that’s the best way of increasing engagement. 
 
We’re very conscious that people have their own preferences for how they give and receive information. Not everyone wants to attend face-to-face events or complete paper surveys but equally not everyone wants to, or is able to, attend online meetings or complete online surveys. We’ll offer a wide range of ways for people / organisations to tell us what they think and we’ll make no assumptions about how we should do that. We’ll be led by people and the organisations they already work with. Exactly how we do this will become clear in the coming weeks and months. 
 
We’ll shortly begin to communicate with people and organisations across the city to plan the review, and we'll provide updates on our Twitter page and the HSCP website in the coming months on how to get involved. This is a new way for us to engage and there’ll be much to consider to do it properly. So please bear with us but we hope it proves to be successful and gives people a chance to influence the work of the HSCP in the areas that are important to them.