Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government is clear that the people of Tayside must have access to high quality, safe and effective services and have trust and confidence in the services provided. From our ongoing engagement with key stakeholders in Tayside – such as the staff representatives the Cabinet Secretary for Health and I met earlier this week – it is clear that significant concerns remain. These must be addressed and Ministers have made their expectations clear.

NHS Tayside commissioned the Independent Inquiry and they, and Tayside Health & Social Care Partnerships, have confirmed that they will respond to the findings of the Inquiry when the final report becomes available. NHS Tayside and their local delivery partners have already agreed a number of measures to ensure rapid progress in taking forward the Inquiry’s forthcoming recommendations. These include the development of a detailed action plan, new arrangements to ensure effective delivery and strong leadership commitment across all agencies.

The Scottish Government will monitor NHS Tayside’s progress through the continuation of the NHS Tayside Oversight group and will continue to seek assurance that the required improvements are being implemented, working alongside COSLA to ensure NHS Boards, Councils and Integration Joint Boards are supported to work together across Scotland to build on the Inquiry's recommendations.

Scottish Government has already provided a package of support to NHS Tayside by facilitating connections with other NHS Boards and the Royal College of Psychiatrists to share learning and professional practice.

In the coming weeks, this support will be intensified to address service provision, clinical practice, organisational development and community led services. In particular, we will work with NHS Tayside to secure:

• Multi-disciplinary clinical and practice support, bringing specialists from across a range of mental health specialities and backgrounds to provide support and challenge;
• Communications and Engagement expertise ;
• Organisational development expertise to support culture change;
• Agreement with the Royal College of Psychiatry’s UK College Centre for Quality Improvement (CCQI) to assess the quality of clinical services and areas for improvement;
• Engagement with the Royal College of Psychiatrists to provide senior support and guidance and;
• Programme management support to enable delivery of Tayside’s improvement plans.

In addition, Healthcare Improvement Scotland will offer specific support in addressing the quality of adult community health services.

This range of actions will ensure that the right advice, support and challenge is in place and will also provide insight on implementation of improvements, strategy development and potential service change.

All this activity will be focused on ensuring significant improvement in Mental Health services across Tayside. To provide further assurance that the necessary progress has been made, the Chair of the Independent Inquiry, David Strang, has agreed to undertake a progress update in February 2021 to monitor whether the required improvements have been made.

Finally, I am determined to secure assurance of the quality of mental health services across the country. I therefore look forward to chairing the first meeting of the new Quality & Safety Board on 19 February 2020.