Summary of Integration Joint Board meeting: March 2025

Falkirk’s Integration Joint Board, responsible for the strategic planning and operational oversight of local health and social care services, met on 21 March 2025. Here’s a summary of what member’s discussed:

Chief Officer Report

Presented at each board meeting, the Chief Officer report provides an overview of local, regional, and national updates across health and social care. This report presented a range of updates, including:

• Mental Welfare Commission visit to HMP Glenochil: The MWC visited HMP Glenochil on 6 February 2025. The Commission’s will look at mental health services being provided to prisoners’ and their experience of using these services. Their report is expected in 12 weeks which will be presented to a future meeting of the Performance, Audit and Assurance Committee when received.
• eBrokerage: The Partnership’s new eBrokerage web-based system for allocating packages of care was launched on Monday 3 February. The system will significantly reduce the time taken to assess needs and identify a suitable care at home provider. The system is expected to reduce the existing turnaround time from around 21 to 4 hours.
• National Care Service update: The Minister for Social Care, Mental Health, Wellbeing and Sport has provided an update on plans for a National Care Service. Amended legislation will now focus on developing new digital approaches to information across health and social care, rights to breaks for carers, and the delivery of Anne’s Law. In addition, a National Care Service Advisory Board will be established.

Financial Updates

Members of the Board received the latest financial information, and set the annual budget for local health and social care services, worth £312m. Further information about the Partnership’s annual budget can be found on the Partnership’s news pages.

Moving On Policy

The Board approved a new ‘Moving On Policy’, which establishes clear and consistent protocols for staff, patients, families, and carers when preparing to discharge someone from hospital. The policy will help people leave hospital as soon as they are clinically fit to do so and ensure people get the right care from the right place. The policy will also be submitted to NHS Forth Valley and the Integration Joint Board for Stirling and Clackmannanshire to ensure a consistent approach across the Forth Valley area.

Eligibility Criteria

The Board has approved new eligibility criteria for Falkirk. The criteria provides guidelines and standards to determine whether an adult or their carer requires a social care service. The criteria seeks to allocate resources fairly and effectively, prioritising the greatest needs or risks. The criteria apply to all social care services, aids, and adaptions provided to adults and/or their carers in Falkirk.

The criteria sets out 4 levels of risk (Low – Critical), which are used to assess a person’s needs. Individuals may have both low and high priority needs. The criteria outlines that not all needs will be addressed immediately, to ensure everyone’s high priority needs are met as soon as possible.

Health and Care Staffing (Scotland) Act 2019 Annual Report

Following the full implementation of new legislation for the provision of appropriate staffing in health and care services, all health boards must publish and submit an annual report to Scottish Ministers on the steps taken to comply with a range of new duties.

The Board noted the report, which will be the first annual update and is due in two parts covering the health and care elements of the legislation. The report relating to health will be published by NHS Forth Valley in April, followed by the care report in June.

The report provides a summary of key elements relating to Falkirk healthcare services and staff, including:

• Demonstrating the fulfilled duty to ensure appropriate staffing and appropriate use of agency staff, there has been no agency usage above 150% of the base pay across Falkirk HSCP services.
• To fulfil duties to have real time staffing assessments and risk escalation processes in place, SafeCare is now implemented within all community hospital inpatient areas. The eRoster team are now working with specialist nursing, mental health services, prisons, community nursing, AHP’s and Medics to implement eRostering and then SafeCare will follow.
• Satisfying the duty to seek clinical advice on staffing, a process for seeking advice is in place across all healthcare teams within the Partnership. Plans are in place to develop workforce governance across all professional groups including HSCPs with membership from relevant professionals and clinicians.

Recurring items:

In addition to topical and thematic reports, the Board received updates covering:

• Agenda item 11 – Communications and Engagement Update
• Agenda item 12 – Following the establishment of the new Performance, Audit, and Assurance Committee, the IJB will now receive an Assurance Report at each meeting.

Watch the discussion

All Integration Joint Board meetings are livestreamed on Falkirk Council’s Committee Meetings YouTube channel. A recording is available to watch shortly after. A copy of all Board reports can be found on the Falkirk Council committee webpages.

The next meeting of the Integration Joint Board will be held on 20 June 2025. The  Performance, Audit, and Assurance Committee will meet on 13 June.