Welcome to the first issue of Partnership Matters for the year ahead. It’s hard to believe that January is already behind us, and we’re well into February. I hope you managed to have an enjoyable holiday season with family and friends, and that our health and social care staff and partners had a well-earned break at some point.

I’d also like to express my gratitude to staff and partners who were working over the holidays to deliver essential services to our city’s most vulnerable patients and service users. Your efforts to maintain care and support and be that familiar face during the holiday period will have meant a lot to them, and I appreciate that this was at a time when we were facing increasing pressures impacting our health and social care system – such as winter flu, COVID-19, staffing pressures and delayed discharge among others. Thank you.

Challenges remain as we’re finalising our next Strategic Plan (2023 – 26) for health and social care in the city and getting confirmation of what our budget contributions will be from our partner organisations (Glasgow City Council and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde) for the planning and delivery of services over the next financial year, 2023 -24. Both will be discussed at our Integration Joint Board’s (IJB) meeting on 22 March. Our main challenge is financial, largely due to the significant increase in inflation and budget pressures.

Whilst we’re still to get confirmation of our exact budget for 2023 -24, and as is the case this year and has been for several years, we’ll be required to meet funding gaps and therefore agree on areas where savings can be made. Myself and the Senior Management Team have been considering a range of possibilities for savings for our IJB to discuss and agree at their March meeting. I want to reassure you that we’re working really hard to make sure that we can continue to deliver services that our patients, service users, carers and their families rely on. As I’ve said before, it’s been the continued commitment, dedication and resilience of our staff and partners over the past years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, that has kept our city supported and helped strengthen our position.

Reports on our budget for the next financial year, including the medium-term financial outlook, will be available on our HSCP’s website as part of the March meeting papers when they are published in advance of the IJB’s meeting.

In this issue, we continue to feature work where the health and social care needs of those we support are at the very centre of what we do, with the aim of helping people to get the right care and support, in the right place and at the right time. Features include:

• an update on our approach to Maximising Independence, which aims to deliver the largest change in health and social care in Glasgow in a generation. We’re keen to understand how to best communicate these changes, and over the next few months we’ll be hosting a People’s Panel to hear from people who use our services as well as our staff and partners
• a training programme helping prisoners to tackle drug issues, which has won several awards including Volunteer of the Year at our HSCP Staff Awards for Excellence 2022
• an update on Glasgow’s Promise, which is our pledge to do things better and differently to ensure our most vulnerable children experience a better childhood. We give a recap of the Promise and catch up with our Promise Participation Workers who recently started in their jobs to help capture the views of children, young people and their families in decisions that affect them and how we shape our services and
• an article on two of our nurses – Elizabeth Briody and Lorraine Daly – who recently completed a nine-month development programme and were awarded the prestigious title of ‘Queen’s Nurse’ by the Queen’s Nursing Institute of Scotland (QNIS). The QNIS aims to equip nurses with the education, skills and confidence they need to help people achieve better health and wellbeing. Congratulations to Elizabeth and Lorraine, job well done!

We also include in this issue web links to more news articles that have been published on our website since our last issue, as well as links to upcoming meetings and events.

I hope you continue to find Partnership Matters useful in keeping you up to date with some of the work that’s happening across our HSCP with partners. If you have something you’d like to feature, feel free to email us at GCHSCP_Communications@glasgow.gov.uk.

Susanne