The United Nations Climate Change Conference – COP26 – will soon arrive in Glasgow, taking place from Sunday, 31 October to Friday, 12 November. The event will be one of the largest ever held in Glasgow, with more than 25,000 people expected to attend the event including world leaders, their delegations and climate activists.

The event itself will require significant security arrangements, and there’ll be a huge impact on both roads and public transport, with major areas of Glasgow being closed off and diversions in place. Roads and public transport are expected to be impacted across Scotland’s Central belt, too, not just in Glasgow. The Get Ready Glasgow website provides accurate, up-to-date information on how roads are being impacted, and people are being advised to regularly visit the website prior to and during the event if their visiting or travelling within Glasgow.

Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) has been preparing and planning for COP26 for a number of months now, to continue to provide our health and social care services and minimise any disruption to them to ensure that our patients, service users and carers continue to be supported.

This has been being co-ordinated at a Partnership level by our HSCP COP26 Planning Group, which includes representatives from all HSCP services who link in with locality and care group management teams.

We’ve also been linking in with our partner organisations, Glasgow City Council and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, and partner agencies in the Glasgow and East Dunbartonshire Local Resilience Partnership, including Police Scotland, Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) and Scottish Ambulance Service among others.

During the event itself, our HSCP will have a duty officer in Glasgow City’s Co-ordination Centre for COP26, alongside key Council and emergency services. This will ensure ongoing communication with other agencies such as Police Scotland, SFRS, Scottish Ambulance Service and Transport to ensure that any disruption or anticipated disruption within the city during the conference can be quickly communicated to our HSCP services and arrangements can be put in place at the earliest opportunity to limit or avoid disruption for our patients, service users and staff.

As part of planning for anticipated impacts COP26 may have on the delivery of our services, we’ve been using a ‘risk-based’ approach, the same approach that’s been taken by the Council, Health Board and COP26 event delivery partners.

For example, there’s a number of potential risks that can impact our HSCP’s Care Services, where we currently deliver approximately 80,000 visits per week to approximately 4,800 services within Care at Home – travel across the city; supply chain; access to working locations and service users’ homes; and impact on businesses, partner organisations and / or essential services such as pharmacies among other areas.

Our HSCP’s Care Services have been considering these areas of risk and taking steps to minimise disruption to their service and the impact this can have on our staff and service users. Work has been carried out to plan effectively, ensuring alternative sites, resources and other measures have been put in place to allow the service to continue operating with minimal disruption and ensure that our service users continue to be supported during COP26.

Our HSCP has also been taking steps to inform our partner organisations supporting the health and social effort across the city, and we are committed to supporting our partners throughout the COP26 event if their services are impacted by it.

Allison Eccles, our Head of Business Development for the HSCP who has been leading on ensuring that our HSCP services have contingency arrangements in place for COP26, encourages people to plan ahead during COP26: “Whilst it’s very exciting times for Glasgow to be hosting a world-class event like COP26 and our city will positively benefit from it, understandably it’ll impact our city in a number of ways including the delivery of our services. We’ve been working over the months to plan for the event’s impact, and we’ve been putting arrangements in place to ensure that any service disruption is minimised and our patients, service users and staff remain supported. If you live in Glasgow, or will be visiting the city during the event, I would encourage you to plan ahead when you travel and regularly check the Get Ready Glasgow website”.