See Me Call for Updated NHS Charter of Patient Rights and Responsibilities

Posted by See Me, 20 September 2017

See Me has responded to the Scottish Government’s Consultation on the NHS Charter of Patient Rights and Responsibilities. 

We want to make sure that the Charter fulfils its purpose of being clear on what the rights and responsibilities are for people accessing health and social care services, and to ensure everyone knows how to use it.

The health and social care landscape is changing within Scotland as the Scottish Government work to make health and social care integrated and seamless from the point of view of the person accessing support and services. In response to this we are calling for an updated Charter which reflects this integration, and is clear on how and where the Charter can be used.

It is also important that the Charter highlights how essential feedback is to allow for continuous improvement and to avoid unnecessarily prolonged system failures, and that new feedback mechanisms such as Care Opinion are clearly signposted within it. Often people can find the terminology of rights difficult to understand and not appropriate for what they are experiencing. So we think honest feedback is essential to a functioning and improving health and social care system.

A key issue is that people who access support and services, their relatives, their carers, and the staff who care for them, all struggle with human rights – in terms of awareness, accessibility, applicability, and accountability. Whilst the current health and social care policies talk about how important human rights and the PANEL principles are, these practical aspects of rights remain an issue, and it is these that we think an improved Charter should be supporting.

We also encourage thought be given to a national awareness campaign on human rights more generally, ensuring that people are aware of them, and why they are relevant.

Finally, we highlighted some of the ways that See Me approaches human rights, including through previous work on Rights for Life, and a forthcoming Community Conversations toolkit (watch out for more information on this coming out soon).

We suggested that the Rights for Life Declaration could be used in the development of the updated Charter. Moving forward our volunteers could use it in their work looking to influence the design, delivery and evaluation of services, and also champion it through their extensive peer networks, helping to reach people who don’t often get to have their say on issues like this.

Read See Me Scotland Response to the Scottish Government’s NHS Charter of Patient Rights and Responsibilities Consultation here.