People living with long term conditions, and the organisations which support them, are being asked to feed back on the Scottish government’s proposed new approach to making national improvements.

A consultation on a Long Term Conditions Framework lays out the government’s plans to shift away from a condition-specific focus, to instead bring together all conditions under a single policy umbrella to improve early identification and care.

The government says the framework will highlight improvements which can apply to all long term conditions as well as targeted actions on specific conditions.

Responses to the consultation are welcome until 20 July, which will then feed into development of a final Long Term Conditions Framework to be published later this year.

It asks questions around what is already working well in long term conditions, what could be better and what improvements should be prioritised.

In the consultation foreword, public health minister Jenni Minto said the framework will explore how to improve the approach to healthcare quality, care, support and inequalities, supporting wider NHS reform:

“We want to empower NHS boards and other partner organisations to deliver improvements that benefit as many people as possible, including those living with multiple conditions.

“We know this approach can work: we already approach our policymaking on other issues, such as prevention and population health, in a cross-cutting way that focuses first and foremost on people’s needs as individuals rather than being segmented by condition.

“It is for these reasons that we are reviewing our approach to policy for the care and support of people with long term conditions.”

Around 38% of people in Scotland are estimated to be living with at least one long term condition.

The approach taken by ministers until now has been to pursue improvements within disease-specific improvement plans, as seen with diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

As a result, conditions including gastrointestinal disease and kidney disease, which have no action plan but affect tens of thousands of people in Scotland, receive less policy focus and no dedicated funding, according to the consultation document.

With increasingly challenged public finances and one in four Scots now thought to be living with more than one long term condition, the government now says this condition-specific approach is ‘not a viable way forward’.

A unified Long Term Conditions Framework will instead, it says, allow for a more equitable and efficient approach to improvement, while improving the coordination of care across conditions.

The consultation launch coincides with some condition-specific strategies coming to an end later this year or in 2026.

This includes commitments made in the 2021 respiratory care action plan, which a leading national health charity said earlier this week have been effectively “abandoned”.

The Scottish government acknowledges in its long-term conditions consultation document resources have in the past not been ‘allocated as impactfully’ as they could be.

It also says the government has made more than 150 commitments within long term conditions, which has presented challenges in how ‘realistic it is for the health service to deliver them’.

Actions from existing strategies and frameworks which have still be to be taken forward will now be considered as part of the new framework and action plan.

It is expected that improvements around rare diseases, cancer, mental health conditions and congenital conditions will continue to be considered separately.

 

Read more: MSPs to question kidney disease priority status; Lung health priorities ‘abandoned’ by government; GPs to tackle hidden risks of heart disease