Partnership Improvement and Outcomes Division

Supporting Better National Outcomes

A constituent part of the Directorate of Primary and Community Care within the Scottish Government's Health Directorates, the Partnership Improvement and Outcomes Division (PIOD) was established around two complementary core themes, "Outcomes" and "Improvement", both set within a context for partnership working which reflects the Scottish Government's strategic requirement to work in partnership across organisational and professional boundaries. PIOD brings together many key strategic elements of the partnership between NHSScotland, the Scottish Government and COSLA.

Through its support to local partnerships, PIOD is working to build a cross-cutting and cohesive framework for health, housing and social care working. Its aim is to improve community care outcomes for service users and carers by supporting and enabling better partnership working and promoting innovation and efficiency through whole systems approaches to achieve more personalised services.

PIOD provides support to external partnerships to implement and deliver these outcomes, its staff bring recent and relevant experience from within health, social care and government. The Joint Improvement Team within PIOD is also able to access the specific knowledge and expertise that our Associates and Action Group members bring to the table, each of whom can provide input on individual work areas.

Purpose, Aims and Approach

  • PIOD's key purpose is to enable health, housing and social care partnerships to deliver better outcomes for service users and carers.
  • The aim is to build capacity within local partnerships and create a performance management infrastructure that both supports and challenges partnerships in their pursuit of continuous improvement.
  • Our approach is to actively engage with those organisations and groups with a stake in health, housing and social work in order to design, develop and deliver improvements to the quality, range and responsiveness of services.

Improvement Group

The Improvement Group consists of the Joint Improvement Team working closely with a policy team focussing on delayed discharge, NHS continuing healthcare and equipment and adaptations. The JIT works on a voluntary basis with partnerships to achieve real, sustainable improvements that suit local needs. You can find out more about JIT here

Joint Outcomes Team (formerly JFU)

The Joint Outcomes Team is the lead policy on joint working between local authorities and the NHS in community care. The main aim is to provide faster access to better and more joined up services through improved joint working. Local partnerships are expected to take holistic decisions on the management, financing and delivery of community care services for all care groups. The initial focus was on putting in place the infrastructure - Joint Management and Joint Resourcing, Single Shared Assessment and joint reporting of performance. The policy is to now focus on outcomes - better and faster results for people using community care services. Key to that are the 4 national outcomes for community care, supported by 16 performance measures. The new National Minimum Information Standards can inform 10 of the 16 measures and the work in JIT on user and carer involvement through Talking Points : A Personal Outcomes Approach Evaluation Toolkit (formerly UDSET) will be a key supportive tool for partnerships. More information of the Outcomes group can be found here

The Scottish Government is committed to significantly reducing the number of people in Scotland who are waiting to move from hospital wards to more appropriate care settings. Within the Joint Outcomes Team is the delayed discharge team which is dedicated to ensuring that all NHS/local authority partnerships across Scotland maintain the delayed discharge standard of having no-one inappropriately delayed in hospital for longer than the agreed 6 week discharge planning period. Further information can be accessed via the Delayed Discharge website. The team is also leading on work to develop intermediate care services, evaluating existing provision and ensuring that good and emerging practice is shared across all partnerships.

The team also recently issued revised NHS Continuing Healthcare guidance. The implementation of this guidance will be monitored to ensure consistency of approach across Scotland. A 'Decision Support Tool' is being developed to assist this.

The team issued revised guidance on equipment and adaptations in December 2009. Equipment and Adaptations play a vital role in improving the quality of people's lives. They can also help people to live more independently in their own homes and can reduce the need for home care services. The Equipment and Adaptations agenda extends beyond social work service equipment and (temporary) adaptations for daily living and health nursing equipment. It includes the application of environmental control systems in a health context and the provision of wheelchairs and other mobility and communication equipment as well as related requirements in building adaptation and design across all tenures, including voluntary sector provision, in the light of rapidly developing technologies. More information can be found here

For more information please contact us