Voices Scotland

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About Voices Scotland

Health and social care staff

Influencing on self management: COSMIC

Video transcript (PDF)

Independent evaluation of the Voices Scotland programme

Voices Scotland conference posters

Journal publications

About Voices Scotland

Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland (CHSS) is supporting you to have your say with Voices Scotland.

Health and social care services in Scotland are committed to becoming more person-centred.

The Scottish Government are continually encouraging health and social care services to engage with patients and carers (The Healthcare Quality Strategy for NHS Scotland (2010)).

In order to do this they need to talk to you and to learn from your experience. Getting involved can be a valuable and fascinating experience. You can learn new skills and meet like–minded people and professionals.

The Voices Scotland programme is delivered by Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland (CHSS). It has built a national network of people affected by chest, heart and stroke conditions to help them have their say. Through free workshops and ongoing support. you will be provided with the knowledge, skills and confidence to work with the health and social care services. This will help them to plan new and better services. The VOICES workshops: Chest Voices, Hearty Voices and Stroke Voices (for those with communication support needs) enable you to have your say so that you can make a difference to the health of Scotland.

You can also join the Voices Scotland register to be kept informed.

Health and Social Care Staff

As a professional, you can:

develop effective Public Involvement to improve your person-centred services
learn more about the perspective of patients and carers
use Voices Scotland to advertise local opportunities for patients and carers to get involved
host a public involvement event
form a strategic approach to your public involvement within your organisation
understand how to involve the public in front line services on our Advice for front line staff page

Influencing Self Management

COSMIC (Champions of Self Management in Care)

The Scotland Government also wants to learn from your experiences of living with long term conditions. It is encouraging services to support you to self manage. Central to this, it wants service improvement to be driven not by policy makers but by the people themselves – YOU!

The Scottish Government has set out its vision in the following policy:

Gaun Yersel: The Self Management Strategy for Long Term Conditions in Scotland (2008)

Voices Scotland supports you to influence services on self management issues through our COSMIC (Champions of Self Management in Care) Workshops and COSMIC Resources

Independent Evaluation of the Voices Scotland Programme

Scottish Health Council and Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland commissioned an independent evaluation of Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland’s Voices Scotland programme.

We are delighted to say that the evaluation found that the programme goes far beyond simply providing a set of effective training materials. By crucially combining these with an approach to facilitation and support which has been developed over years by the Voices Scotland team.

Of the VOICES workshop participants who responded to the evaluation survey:

90% reported that they spend at least some time on involvement activities since attending a VOICES or COSMIC workshop. 32% said that they spent five days or more per month on such activities.
68% rated the workshop as ‘very important’ in enabling them to do the things they were most proud of having achieved in the workshop,
a further 25% saying it was ‘somewhat important’.

91% of Managed Clinical Network managers said that the programme had made ‘some’ or ‘a significant’ contribution to the development of their organisation’s public involvement strategy.

Read the briefing paper and full external evaluation in related documents (below)

Conference Posters

NHSScotland Event 2015 Making it easier: Tackling Barriers to reduce health inequalities (PDF)

Launch of the Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrest (OHCA) Strategy at Scottish Cardiac Arrest Symposium 2015: OHCA: Assessing the rehabilitation and aftercare needs of the survivor (PDF)

NHSScotland Event 2014: Cascading COSMIC Supporting the House of Care (PDF)

SIGN 20th Anniversary Conference: SIGNposting patients to use evidence to improve services (PDF)

NHSScotland Event 2012: Empowering stroke patients to have their say in a mutual NHS (PDF)

NHSScotland Event 2010: Empowering Respiratory Patients to have their views heard for a mutual NHS (PDF)

NHSScotland Event 2008 : Hearty Voices Scotland – The outcomes. Supporting a mutual NHS and improving quality and services (PDF)

Journal publications

1 Involving patients in clinical research: the Telescot Patient Panel (2013) (PDF) Peter Fairbrother BA MSc, Lucy McCloughan BSc PhD, Geraldine Adam, Richard Brand MA, Cecil Brown, Mary Watson, Nicola Cotter, Juliet MacKellaig BSc RGN NDNC and Brian McKinstry MBChB MRCPUK MRCGP FRCGP MD FRCPE Health Expectations John Wiley & Sons

2 Stroke Voices: Empowering stroke patients to have their say in a person-centred NHS in Scotland (2014) (PDF) Juliet MacKellaig, Nicola Cotter, Louise Peardon and Dave Bertin British Journal of Neuroscience Nursing Vol 10: No 2