Last year’s Audit Scotland report reviewing health and social care integration showed that integration is still very much work in progress. All the organisations in our network would certainly say that. In some areas, the third sector, communities and unpaid carers seem to be very involved in planning and decision making. In other areas, that happens less.
In our written submission, we raised the issue that, for third sector organisations that want to be involved and have resources and assets to bring to the table, the levels of planning, structures and boundaries are increasingly complicated: there are GP clusters, localities, community planning partnerships, social care partnerships and so on. The landscape is quite complex, not only for small voluntary health organisations, but for national health charities that do not necessarily have huge resources on the ground at local level.
Interestingly, our members do not talk to us about GP clusters, other than in Drumchapel and Yoker, where the community-based mental health charity, COPE Scotland, has been working very successfully with the deep-end GP cluster there, which is led by Dr Peter Cawston. They developed the jigsaw project, which was focused on quality improvement for people in the community with enduring and recurring mental health issues, who, it was recognised, were falling through the gaps in services and not accessing those that might be there for them. I commend the report on that interesting piece of work to the committee, because it shows how collaboration can work at local level, not only with the third sector, but with the community partners; the people themselves are very much involved in that project—as are NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and other partners.
I have no information as to whether work with that level of collaboration, including with the third sector, is taking place at cluster level in other communities across Scotland, but that example is worth looking at.