In this project, researchers, musicians and artists will work with community members to consider the history of rural health and care in the Highlands and Islands. In the year of the 75th anniversary of the NHS, project participants will draw on their own memories, as well as archive and research materials, to re-imagine what the future of rural health and care might look like. Together, we will go on a creative journey that asks us to reflect on the challenges, innovations and opportunities surrounding rural health and care and give our answer to the question: what should health and care in rural and island Scotland look like in the future? What will our rural communities need from health and care services as the NHS has its next significant birthdays and turns 80, 90 and even 100 years old? In what ways does the NHS need to work together with social care and the community sector to deliver for the needs of rural communities? Project researchers will invite residents from Shetland and Inverness and its surrounding rural regions to take part in a series of workshops that discuss material from Highland archive, museum and library collections (including the Scottish Archive film Highland Doctor), ongoing UHI doctoral research (being carried out by Lyn Anderson on health and care in Shetland before the NHS) and new oral histories collected by project team members. Participants will be supported to record their own memories of rural health and care or to carry out peer research interviews with others. Project partners, Science Ceilidh, will support the wider engagement connecting the community, arts and research elements. This includes co-developing with the community researchers two celebration ceilidh events that combine storytelling, traditional arts and discussion; to bring together and break down the barriers between the wider community alongside policymakers. Participants will be supported to produce materials that leave a legacy on the Scottish Rural Health Partnership website, such as podcasts, posters, drawings and narratives.

In order to deliver business as normal performance, healthcare care providers will need to reconfigure almost all services (many currently in abeyance) to accommodate the future challenges of covid-19 (For example; pulsed lock-downs, isolation of the vulnerable, new testing & tracing regimes, disrupted supply chains, new working practices & new spatial demands on facilities). Quality Improvement (QI) approaches currently provide a research informed framework of tools for local innovation in healthcare. A wide variety of QI tools currently support NHS QI work, drawn from sectors like manufacturing. Over the last 12 months NHS Tayside has integrated a services of additional QI tools based on Service Design into its QI Programmes. These design approaches work alongside established QI tools to map the service-user (patient) perspective. This proposal describes the development of an online QI tool that will support the challenge of mapping, evaluating and reconfiguring services that take account of the evolving risks & challenges of COVID-19. NHS Tayside will provide the platform for tool development, NHS Education for Scotland (NES) will provide specialist QI guidance & access to wide networks for dissemination. UoStrathclyde will provide service design research expertise. Development will involve: capturing lessons learnt from recently established COVID-19 pathways, integration of proven service design tools with established risk management tools, collation of research into COVID-19 risks and mitigations, synthesis and testing of tool templates and development of online training to deliver the new tool in a QI context. Tool effectiveness will be evaluated. Knowledge gained will be valuable and widely transferable to other service sectors within the service economy, challenged with redesigning & implementing COVID-19 mitigations.

Developed in partnership with Public Health England, Public Health Wales and NHS Education for Scotland, this bid addresses key challenges that the coronavirus pandemic presents in relation to understanding the flow and impact of public health messages as reflected in public and private discourses. Our collaborators above who are charged with constructing effective public health messages have identified two particular challenges: messaging around geographical borders (e.g. between England and Wales, and in local lockdowns) and messaging aimed at BAME populations. These areas will be the focus of our research, and we will deliver benefits to our collaborators in the form of initial analytical results and discussion from month 2 onwards. As human behaviour is shaped by the reception and production of discourse, and by the reasoning about different sources of information, we propose a new approach to track the trajectories of public health messages once they are released to the public. Moving beyond corpus linguistic approaches that focus on language production, we will investigate the complex relationship between the production and the reception of discourses relating to specific types of public health messages, focusing on linguistic patterns (in particular modality and stance markers). Drawing on our track record in the construction and analysis of heterogenous corpora and our ongoing work on privacy enhancing technologies, we propose to carry out the first large scale analysis of the trajectories of public health messages relating to the coronavirus pandemic in the UK.

In 2010 the applicant completed a piece of work funded by the AHRC which looked at the spiritual needs and lives of people with profound learning disability. Understanding the spiritual lives of people with profound and complex learning disabilities: a community oriented action research approach. AH/F011482/1. A product that came unexpectedly out of this study was the ASSFAP: a seven stepped facilitated action plan. This educational and process tool/system was specifically designed to be used by communities to explore, understand and respond to the spiritual needs of people with severe intellectual and cognitive impairments through the use of an action planning system of spiritual care development and delivery. Whilst there are recognisable differences between the two populations, it was felt that this process could be transferred and applied to other settings and that it could provide for the needs of a wide range of people with profound communication difficulties. People with advanced dementia are a group of people, like those with profound learning difficulties, who are often overlooked and can be the subject of poor care through a lack of knowing what to do and how to be with them. This resource provides a method of "doing and being" for those who care for them professionally and within families, which enhances the quality of life of both the carers and the people with communication difficulties. The project presented here focuses on making this resource (ASSFAP) available to the community of carers who look after people with advanced dementia; either those who live either at home, in residential care or in hospital. It comes at a time when the care of frail elderly people has been spotlighted by The Care Inspectorate (formerly the Care Commission) as requiring urgent attention. There is growing concern that care of older people, particularly those with advanced dementia, is being reduced to what has been called "bed and body work" to the enormous detriment of the older person and shame of our society.

What Works Scotland will be a collaborative centre bringing together staff from the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, other academics and key non-academic partners. Its aim is to support the use of evidence to plan and deliver sustained and transformative change based on agreed outcomes at all levels with a particular focus on the local. There is a particular focus on promoting the systematic use of evidence in the design, reform and delivery of public services. Examination of what works and what does not will take place in the context of the Scottish model, an approach to policy development that, while not unique, differs considerably from elsewhere in the UK. The team has adopted a demand led and collaborative approach and will work with a range of third sector organisations, different levels of central and local government and with Community Planning Partnerships to generate an evidence culture involving feedback, improvement methodology and expert support. The Christie Commission identified a range of problems facing Scotland including demographic change, economic and fiscal challenges, inter-institutional relationships and endemic long-term 'wicked issues'. It has also been estimated that in Scotland over 40 per cent of public service expenditure is the result of preventable issues. The Scottish model of public service delivery aims to ensure that services are designed for and with communities. This 'deliberative public policy analysis' demands that communities and those who design services are aware of best practice and evidence. The Community Planning Partnerships (CPPs) are key to the delivery of these services with a focus on 'voice' through participatory, collective, decision-making, planning and delivery in the context of targets set by National Government. A key challenge for each CPP is to articulate its Single Outcome Agreement and relate this to both the outcomes set out in the National Performance Framework. However, a common criticism of the CPPs is that the implementation of the model so far has been limited and patchy. The focus of WWS will on the four key questions identified in the call: - How can we take what we know from individual projects and interventions and translate this into system-wide change? - What is working (or not working), and why, at the different levels of delivery and reform and at the interface between those levels? How do we identify actions which can be taken in communities, at CPP and the national levels to improve impact? - What does the evidence (including international) say about large-scale reform programmes that have succeeded or failed and the impact they had in a system-wide context? - Why do results vary geographically and between communities, and how can we balance local approaches with ensuring spread of what works? A wide range of methods - qualitative and qualitative - will be employed. The capabilities approach will provide the overarching framework. Originally developed by Amartya Sen, capabilities are in widespread use across the globe and underpin the work of a variety of organisations. It is a useful corrective to top down economic evaluations and fits well with the Scottish deliberative approach. We will develop the Capabilities framework and combine it with the outcomes-based National Performance Framework, ensuring that the Scottish model is intellectually grounded and contributes to broader international debates on these matters. We will have 3 workstreams: evidence into action; outcomes and capabilities; and spread, sustainability and scaling up. We will employ a range of methodologies including case studies collaborative action research, contribution analysis, elite interviews and content analysis, cost effectiveness and evaluation. WWS will focus on four case studies of key CPPS and work with them to help them change their core business processes within priority areas in four CPPs and will aim to achieve lasting impact.