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Report of the Joint Future Group

CHAPTER 8 GOOD PRACTICE

8.1 Our task is to set a new direction for identifying and sharing good practice. As this report makes clear, much of our work is founded in good or innovative practice. We were struck both by the number of good practice examples in Scotland and the growing number of "players" in the development and dissemination of good practice.

8.2 We attribute that increasing interest to a combination of factors: the Government’s greater emphasis on service quality, Best Value, organisational learning and standard setting, as well as broader social trends such as life-long learning, advances in information technology and the growing involvement of service users and their carers.

8.3 In considering options for the collection and dissemination of good practice, we want to minimise ‘re-inventing the wheel’ locally, with all the effort and wasted opportunity that can generate.

The Current Picture

8.4 Our analysis of the current arrangements for sharing good practice identified 3 broad categories of activity. The first comprises organisations whose role is to drive, gather, evaluate and disseminate good practice as a core function. In Scotland, this includes the Nuffield Community Care Database, the Designed Healthcare Initiative, the COSLA Website to showcase good practice (under development) and the Scottish Inter Collegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN). Bodies in England include the Idea and Development Agency, Evidence Base 2000 and the NHS Learning Network (to be subsumed into a Modernisation Agency). In addition to their common focus, this group of bodies is distinctive because of the interactive methods used to share good practice, such as networking and interactive databases.

8.5 The second category focuses on those organisations associated with the development, dissemination and monitoring of standards. They identify good practice as a by-product of standard setting, review or inspection. Examples in Scotland include the Clinical Standards Board, Scottish Homes, Best Value Groups, Audit Scotland, Social Work Services Inspectorate, the Scottish Health Advisory Service and the forthcoming Commission for the Regulation of Care.

8.6 The third category is characterised by more focused activity such as centres of expertise, professional bodies/development units and those engaged in academic activity or consultancy. The Scottish Development Centre for Mental Health and the Scottish Dementia Services Development Centre are centres of expertise driving change in a specific client group. And professional bodies such as the Royal College of Nursing, the British Association of Social Workers, the College of Occupational Therapists, and the Chartered Institute of Housing all engage with their membership on issues of professional good practice. Academic activity and research is sponsored in part by the statutory sector and includes the Nuffield Centres, the NHS Research and Development Fund and the work of the Scottish Executive Central Research Unit.

8.7 We concluded that the links within and between these categories of organisation are incomplete. As a result good practice is not spread on the widest possible basis. The existing knowledge base is not being maximised. We want to develop a culture of inter agency knowledge management and learning. We also considered recent research by the Office for Public Management9 into the dissemination and uptake of good practice. A variety of approaches will be necessary to achieve our aim, to cover different types of knowledge, the range of bodies and the geography of Scotland. We need to harness information technology, but recognise that while technology makes sharing more practicable, it does not of itself make it happen.

The Way Ahead

8.8 As a result of our analysis we recognised the need to:

• encourage those who develop good practice to disseminate it more widely;
• encourage more face to face exchange of more complex good practice through multi-agency networking;
• linking as many as possible of the bodies to maximise the information available and the number of recipients in community care; and
• make better use of information technology, particularly the use of interactive databases.

8.9 We looked at 2 approaches. The first would involve central co-ordination of good practice activity under the auspices of a Scottish centre, linked to the range of bodies above and with a specific role to lead and develop good practice in Scotland. The second would encourage the linking of current bodies into a network without disturbing their separate identities, using the advances of information technology. This will bring greater cohesion and maximise the considerable public resource already invested in many of their activities. We concluded that greater benefit would lie in linking existing players to achieve better co-ordinated activity and to develop effective systems to co-ordinate and disseminate their outputs.

8.10 Improving good practice is a longer term objective. But work to set in train the desired outcomes needs to begin shortly.

8.11 We therefore recommend that:

The Scottish Executive should, by mid 2001-02, identify measures to improve the collection and dissemination of good practice by linking together the bodies in the field in a more cohesive structure, using the benefits of networking and information technology.

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