healthscotland.com

The NHS, Local Authorities and the community and voluntary sectors all play a role in improving Scotland’s health and reducing health inequalities as does the private sector. In the past, organisations and sectors have not managed delivery, accountability and performance improvement as effectively or consistently as they might due to the complexity of Health Improvement across a wide range of organisations and priorities.

The HEAT performance targets for health improvement were widely regarded as unsatisfactory because;

• they were very high level,
• not specific to service delivery and
• not necessarily related to those areas within the NHS sphere of influence.

Achievements to date

2007

The Steering Group is advising the Scottish Government’s Health and Wellbeing Directorate on a performance framework for health improvement. It is a high-level, multi-agency and cross-government group and has so far;

• Agreed a framework for HI outcomes and indicators in-line with the Scottish Government’s National Performance Framework
• Applied this to a set of six priority outcomes to help guide local delivery planning for health improvement.

The NHS Working Group is reviewing the HI and inequalities dimensions of the HEAT targets. It recommended three revised health improvement targets for 2008/09 on;

• Tobacco - smoking cessation
• Alcohol - alcohol brief interventions
• Early years – exclusive breastfeeding rates

These were accepted and two further revisions (on child obesity and suicide prevention) were added by the Scottish Government. These were published in the Better Health Better Care Action Plan (Dec 2007) (external link)

2008

An overview and next steps for 2008 can be found in the Managing for Shared Outcomes paper:

For further information on HIPM for the NHS
Alison McCann
Tel:0131 537 4715
NHS Health Scotland

Page last updated 21st January 2008