Housing

A good quality home is at the heart of the Scottish Government policy of maximising independence. For those who need care and support services to maximise their independence at home, it's crucial that housing is fully connected to the health and social care agenda. Around 9 out of 10 older people live in ordinary housing – not hospitals, care homes, or sheltered housing – and that's where most want to stay.

The clear direction of travel set out by the Scottish Government is to shift the balance of care away from the acute sector and institutional provision to community-based and home-based settings. These settings provide more responsive, flexible, and tailored services, which can be delivered in joined-up ways that cut across traditional organisational and professional boundaries. There is broad support from all stakeholders for this shift, but it does present particular challenges to those who provide these services.

What's JIT doing to help?
In early 2005, JIT commissioned Essential Connections, a programme of work in collaboration with the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH), the Association of Directors of Social Work (ADSW) and Age Concern.

The Essential Connections programme has three stages:

Stage 1: The Essential Connections report, presented at the CIH conference in March 2005. The purpose of this report was to raise the profile of housing within health and social care partnership agendas, both at local and national level. You can download a copy of Essential Connections here:

Essential Connections booklet

Stage 2: A two-year programme of action research in conjunction with interested partnerships. Initially, this has involved the establishment of a Reference Group to carry out development work focusing on good practice, and to generate proposals and recommendations for the future.

Stage 3: A follow-up to the Essential Connections report, as well as further substantive reports on the progress and outcomes from this work, which will provide practical guidance and recommendations for local partnerships and national bodies to consider.

As part of the development work undertaken in Stage 2, we've prepared draft guidance for those who commission services, as they will increasingly have to join up a variety of funding streams to provide coherent service packages that fit community and home-based settings. The information in the draft guide describes and demystifies the major funding streams made available by the Scottish Government for the provision of a range of community care services across health, housing and social care. The purpose of this guide is to assist commissioners with their challenging role, and we are consulting widely before publishing the final version. 1500 copies were sent to those attending the CIH Annual Conference in March 2006 and we've sought the views of members of the Essential Connections Reference Group.

You can download a copy of the draft guidance here:

Understanding the Funding Maze DRAFT April 2006

Partnership focus

We're working closely on Housing-related partnership work with Borders, involving decommissioning care homes and establishing very sheltered housing and other community-based services. If you'd like to know more about our work in the Borders, please contact us.

Efficient Government

We've aimed to link our Housing work, and other Action Areas such as transport, to the Efficient Government initiative, whose primary objective is to utilise the same resources more effectively in order to deliver more and better services to the public. In simple terms, this means having the right staff with the right skills working in the right numbers in the right way. We're analysing a range of plans and strategies across housing, health and social care, liaising with the Efficient Government Unit within the Scottish Government on the scope to rationalise these, and we'll make more guidance available as this work progresses.