What we took away from the Scotland Conference on Integrated Care (SCIC) 2026

The ALLIANCE Integration team reflect on the Scotland Conference on Integrated Care (SCIC) 2026.

On Tuesday 27 October 2026, colleagues came together in Glasgow and online for the Scotland Conference on Integrated Care (SCIC), hosted by IFIC Scotland and partners. Contributors from health, social care, housing, the third sector and lived experience explored how innovation can become better care and support. The programme covered preventative and place-based care, digital innovation, collaborative workforce solutions, embedding lived experience in learning and improvement, and investing for value and outcomes. Workshops and plenaries offered local, national and international perspectives. One message ran through all of them: integration lives in the ‘space in between’, in the connections and relationships between people, services and sectors. Systems work best when they start from what matters to people rather than what matters to the system. The integration team reflects on what they took from the day.

Ali: What mattered most…

For me, it was hearing about Whole Family Support through General Practice. It’s a Scottish Government funded programme built around a new primary care role, the Family Wellbeing Worker. Modelled on the Community Link Worker, the role gives families holistic, non-medical support with things like housing, food insecurity and caring responsibilities, which clinicians aren’t set up to address. There are six workers in Glasgow’s Deep End practices. The pilot has run for two years and is now being evaluated.

What stood out for me is how simple the principles are. There’s no set definition of ‘family’ and no time limit on support, and any primary care colleague can refer. Much of the support happens in families’ own homes. A parent of two children with additional support needs said that the approach meant she ‘didn’t feel like I was a checklist, I was actually seen as a person’. To me, that reflected the day’s wider themes on relational, needs-led support delivered in the community, and in this case, with the family as the focus. The project is also becoming more connected with other services, such as Glasgow Life, which can offer support through libraries and swim passes. I hope that the evaluation can capture the relational outcomes that are more difficult to measure and don’t always show up in standard measures. This is a fantastic example of what community-led, integrated primary care can look like.

Rachel: My biggest take away…

Services need to work together around what matters to the person, and involve people in designing those services, rather than expecting people to fit around the way our systems are organised.

I joined a workshop led by Socialudo, a social enterprise using games and serious play to turn research into positive real world change. The workshop took us through Pathways Paradox, a serious game co produced with Social Bite, about navigating housing, benefits, employment and support services for people experiencing homelessness. It is designed to simulate real world challenges faced by individuals and aims to help players experience the barriers and reflect on how we should tackle them.

What mattered most to me was the reminder that we need to look at housing and employment from the perspective of the person trying to navigate the systems around them, not just from the perspective of the organisations providing services.

Pathway Paradox offered a glimpse of how frustrating that experience can be. Things that services might treat as separate issues are deeply connected in someone’s life: needing a home to secure a job and needing a job to secure a home. When you are the person trying to move forward, this can present a series of barriers.

For me, it is important to look at what is making this support difficult to access, and what needs to change. That means recognising people’s strengths, aspirations and circumstances, rather than defining them by the challenges they face. This game can help us question our assumptions.”

Charlotte: The thing that gives me hope is…

Our best solutions are simple and build on existing strengths. It is easy to confuse ‘innovation’ with ‘invention’, particularly in the tech-enabled care space, but innovation is really about taking what we already have and finding practical ways to make it work better. I think that comes down to perspective – are we looking at the problem from the point of view of the system, or the person needing support? – and approach – are we making assumptions about what will work for people, or are people able to design what will work for them?

At the end of the day, that is what person centred care is all about. The Digital Lifelines project, led by the Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre, really exemplifies this principle. Digital Lifelines gets devices to people at risk of substance related harms so they can stay connected with their circles of care, from their friends and family, to peer networks, and wider healthcare services. Co-production of apps is another strand of the project, by working with people to develop digital tools that make it easier for them to access the information they want and need.

The success of the programme underscores that people don’t need (or want) grand interventions, we need tools that make life easier. That might be a mobile phone that lets you check in on family and speak to a support worker, or a laptop that makes it easier to stay in education because you can type your essays and attend online tutorials.

While there was much to take away, one message was clear: ‘Digital is not the golden ticket. It is an enabler’, of connection, confidence, and growth. Contrary to a popular adage, innovation is not about disruption but about continuity and improvement over time, not overnight.

Want to catch up on the conference? Speaker presentations and recordings of the plenary sessions are available here.

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