Our Health Impact
We’d like to hear your views
The NHS in Scotland is organised into local health boards, each responsible for all hospital, primary care and public health services in their areas. They are supported by eight national health boards. National Services Scotland (NSS) is one of these supporting boards. We provide a range of national and specialist services enabling improvements in Scotland’s health.
We’re focused on delivering value to our customers, every day. As an NHS Scotland organisation our value comes from what we do to improve the health and wellbeing of all the people of Scotland, and we’re constantly seeking ways to contribute more effectively. To this end we have developed a new strategy aimed at maximising our health impact. This strategy is intended to help us understand how what we do impacts on health, and to make this integral to all that we do. When we engage with our partners this needs to be at the core of our discussions. We also need to support and develop all our staff to contribute to increasing our health impact.
We’d like your opinions and comments on our proposed approach, outlined below. We’re particularly keen to hear your views on whether our ideas about describing, quantifying and measuring our Health Impact are valid and meaningful for you, whether you feel our proposed method to describe and quantify it is valid, and what sort of engagement you’d like to have with us on this.
You can feed back to us using our online Health Impact Questionnaire or by sending us an e-mail to nss.communications@nhs.net.
Describing, quantifying and improving our health impact
It’s important we describe and measure our health impact in ways that make sense in terms of the sorts of services we provide. Our goal is to embed a routine consideration of the health benefits of our services in all our planning so that it will become part of everything we do.
We have a small number of services that are provided directly to patients and to the public. For example, the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service (SNBTS) supports life-saving clinical apheresis treatment.
However the majority of what we do is indirect – where we support others to deliver services to the people of Scotland. We have developed a method of describing this based on how we contribute to providing improved quality of care – in particular how we play a vital role in achieving safer, more effective, efficient, equitable, timely and more person-centred care. Some examples of how we can use this are shown in the supporting documents below.
Using this approach we propose to start systematically describing, then quantifying, our overall health impact as part of our planning. We have piloted this in a number of our Divisions and believe we have a solid approach. We then propose to use the principles in the Healthcare Quality Strategy for NHSScotland, supplemented by our own internal process and quality improvement techniques, to help us continuously increase our health impact.
How will we ensure this delivers value to you?
We hope that talking about health impact will be meaningful and relevant to you. We want to use health impact as the basis of our ongoing discussions with you, so we can ensure we focus our resources on how to best contribute to improving Scotland’s health.
We are proposing a new framework for engagement, based on best practice principles, with a focus on our health impact and quality improvement. We would like to develop this through our wider Involving People work across NSS, where we meet with representatives from the local Health Boards’ Public Partnership Forums to talk with them about what we do and seek their views on aspects of our service development. Find out more in our Framework for Systematic Engagement (PDF: 17 Kbytes).
Supporting documents
Health Impact Methodology Guidelines (PDF: 28 Kbytes)
Reflecting Health Impact in our Local Delivery Plans (PDF: 31 Kbytes) – example from Information Services Division
Our 5 year plan for embedding Increasing Health Impact in our activities (PDF: 26 Kbytes)
Our Health Impact