The report ‘A life worth living’  (Summary), published by SCVO, calls for urgent reform of how we care for older people in Scotland. Recommendations include:

 

• Service providers must consult and engage with  people to design cost-effective personalised services
• Engineer out costly overlaps in service
• Improve our measures of well-being in older age so that we can better track the quality and impact of social and health care provision
• Focus on people’s capabilities and shift formal professional care provision towards those with the highest support needs
• Support third sector organisations to be more effective participants in the creation of innovative services for our ageing population
• Ensure commissioning and tendering rules are more third sector friendly
• Government must support and nurture self-help and the community capacity building work of the third sector so that older people themselves can contribute much more to the debate about future patterns of care.