Health and Social Care Academy roundup 2025

The Academy has continued to advocate for long term, meaningful and sustainable change.

Through the Unfolding the Future Toolkit, we have has been able to encourage and facilitate people and organisations to come together to have creative and ambitious conversations about the future of health and care. This year, we facilitated a session with the East Ayrshire Integrated Joint Board strategic planning group. This session encouraged discussions which looked beyond short-term planning cycles to focus on longer-term outcomes. We  also hosted the workshop ‘Sustainable, Equitable and Ambitious: reimagining the future of health and care’ at the NES Annual Conference where we  introduced the Five Ambitions for the Future of Health and Care and the Unfolding the Future Toolkit.

The Academy worked in partnership with the ALLIANCE Integration team and the International Foundation for Integrated Care (IFIC Scotland) to deliver four events as part of the Integration in Action series. The series provided an opportunity to explore how the Five Ambitions can support transformational change by sharing practical examples of them working in action. This included events on the Reimagine Investment, Share Power, Lead Courageously and Measure Outcomes Ambitions.

We worked as a part of the Health and Human Rights Partnership, a partnership with Public Health Scotland and the University of Strathclyde, to help build leadership and capacity building to enable rights-based decision-making. To achieve this, we undertook scoping and published the research report ‘Health and human rights: rights-based decision-making in healthcare settings’. We also showcased a poster at the NHS Conference to highlight key findings from our research ‘Investigating knowledge and understanding of the right to health’.

The Academy proactively built relationships and engaged with key policy and decision makers, to ensure that findings from our our  research shape the development of future policies. This included sharing findings and recommendations the research exploring ‘Experiences of Pregnancy and Maternity Services in Scotland during COVID-19’. Alongside Engender, we met with the Scottish Government Maternal and Infant Health Team to discuss findings in relation to bereavement and miscarriage. Sharing the research has resulted in further influencing and engagement opportunities. In partnership with the ALLIANCE’s Women’s Health Programme, we delivered a focus group on behalf of Healthcare Improvement Scotland to inform the development of Maternity Care Standards. Additionally, the research findings and recommendations were highlighted within the ALLIANCE response to the consultation.

We  responded to the Draft Climate Change Plan Scrutiny Plan 2025. The response sets out how the health and social care sector both contributes and is impacted by climate change. Through this response we highlighted that human rights play a central role in discussions around climate change. We highlighted evidence from previous research including ‘Climate Action and the Social Care Collective’ and ‘Exploring Scotland’s 20-minute neighbourhoods’.

In partnership with See Me, the ALLIANCE’s Self Management programme and Scotland Reducing Gambling Harms programme hosted an event as part of Scotland’s Mental Health Arts Festival. The ‘Disturbing the Picture’ event focused on how photography can help reframe mental health, wellbeing and life experiences through a creative and participatory workshop.

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