Putting the voices of carers at the heart of integration

"It’s important to make sure carers are front and centre when it comes to raising awareness.”

The Carers Collaborative is a forum that supports, evaluates and seeks to improve carer representation on Integration Joint Boards (IJBs) across Scotland. During initial phases of carer representatives’ involvement in IJBs, carers’ support needs were identified with representatives saying that they wanted a forum to keep in touch with one another. To address this, the Collaborative was set up in 2016 with funding from the Scottish Government.

The Collaborative provides the opportunity for carer representatives to meet, share best practice examples and look at what can be improved across Scotland. Working in a co-productive way, the carer representatives develop their own best practice guidelines and decide on a work plan. Annually, the Collaborative produces a scoping report identifying what has improved, challenges, what can be learned and recommendations for the future.

In terms of ensuring accountability and transparency in health and social care, the Carers Collaborative provides a powerful forum due to its work in furthering the support of carers so that they can play a more meaningful role as members of IJBs. The annual scoping report benchmarks IJBs’ progress in terms of carer engagement and has been an important tool which has improved standards. It has been used in the Scottish Government’s review of integration and in the related Audit Scotland report.

Empowering carers to better participate in the work of IJBs, the Collaborative has worked in several areas advocating for key standards, including that all expenses are provided, that carers are given a proper induction and that people are able to get their points onto the meeting agendas. Ultimately, the best practice across the country is collected and shared with other IJBs to improve standards across the board.

The issue of expenses is an important one. A good expenses policy can be the difference between a carer being able play a part on their IJB or not. It ensures that people are given the opportunity to take a seat at the table, have influential input and are not expected to subsidise costs from their own pocket.

The Collaborative has been able to bear influence in relation to the Carers Act, producing briefing papers for IJBs and prompting good practice around implementation. However, this has varied depending on the extent to which carer representatives are treated as equal partners. On the agenda, in terms of furthering accountability and transparency, is the subject of key performance indicators (KPIs) for IJBs around carers. There is a feeling that KPIs would better chart progress in a meaningful way and the Collaborative will be working on encouraging partnerships to adopt them.

Claire Cairns, Network Development Officer at the Coalition of Carers Scotland, points out that being a carer representative is about much more than an individual’s voice being heard. The question is: are their voices being acted on?

“It’s about better services, and resources going to the right place is very much the outcome when you do listen to and act on what carers say. It’s important to make sure carers are front and centre when it comes to raising awareness.”

Ultimately, there is still work to be done. In some areas there is a good system of support and an open-door policy, but this is not so in others where the support is not as comprehensive, and carers are battling to make progress. Claire is positive about the future and is looking forward to a newly funded partnership project with Carers Scotland that will develop training in local areas. This training aims to identify carers who wish to be involved in strategic planning and provide people with the tools to take part in partnership meetings in a constructive and meaningful way.