Social Care: Independent Review of Inspection, Scrutiny and Regulation in Scotland - call for evidence

A human-rights based approach could mean that people are more involved in decisions relating to inspection, scrutiny and regulation, and the actual inspections etc themselves. For example, which organisations should be subject to inspection, or the lived experience of the service/ organisations being inspected.

Meaningful engagement for people with lived and living experience could also include the opportunity for pre consultation information and awareness sessions and post consultation reflection / feedback.

There are already some examples of organisations shifting to a rights-based approach but confidence around this is inconsistent, better sharing of good practice and the encouragement of a similar approach would help people engage and limit the burden on them when they do so.

There is a need for more support to help organisations move to a human-rights based approach with support for training at both governance and front-line levels.
Support is also needed for those with lived experience to ensure they feel confident contributing. Underpinning this access to effective advocacy, which is often seen as essential for access to services but it would also be helpful to ensure this is available to assist those who contribute to these processes.

Different bodies regulate/ inspect different things. They build up a level of professional experience and knowledge in their respective areas which might be diluted if there were a single regulator. What is important is that they are empowered to work more closely and able to share meaningful information and data.

By encouraging and driving a culture of commitment to learning and improvement on the part of regulators and those being regulated. Being open to learning and telling service users of good practice identified and positive change as a result of learning from inspection and regulation is a key element of this.

The commitment also needs to be at a policy level to ensure regulatory bodies are adequately resourced.

See previous answer. While continuous improvement is a positive thing, inspection and regulation should also identify and share good practice, so improvement occurs where it is needed and not simply a generic aim.

Ideally, this should be identified by the service themselves and they should be responsible for putting matters right; communicating with those affected; and informing the appropriate scrutiny/regulator. Where concerns are raised by users and/or staff, simple, straight-forward systems should be in place to enable investigation and reporting of those issues as part of regular reporting both to internal governance and external scrutiny/ regulators. If matters are not resolved, there should be a simple access to an independent external body who can take an objective view and which has sufficient powers to investigate.

The service should remain responsible, but there needs to be follow up to ensure that improvements are taking place and that impact can be seen. Services are more likely to improve if they remain responsible for this. While there is a need for adequate oversight to ensure this occurs, ultimate responsibility should not shift to those oversight bodies. Doing so risks disempowering those who are most able to make a real difference to the experience of users. Change which is imposed is always likely to be short-term and likely to revert to the original position when oversight is lessened.

Through ensuring they themselves identify how impact can be measured and reporting on this publicly. And through meaningful discussion and feedback with organisations under scrutiny.

There is a need to ensure that all those involved have the powers to share meaningful information quickly and securely when required. There may also be benefit to standardising categories and definitions to ensure that data is being collected consistently across organisations, supported by consistency of application and use of data at network / sharing meetings