Phase 1: Local self-assessment - your baseline

To improve the service, start by understanding your baseline. In other words, assess what you currently offer or do around Waiting Well and identify any gaps.

Self-assessment questionnaire

• Use this questionnaire to record your assessment of the current baseline level of support for Waiting Well in your service.  

• The questionnaire includes links to useful resources at each stage of the Waiting Well pathway. It also highlights principles and recommendations for action where there are gaps in your service at any stage in the pathway.

• At the end of the questionnaire you will be prompted to enter your email address to receive a record of your self-assessment. 

Identify key stakeholders to support the development of a more holistic Waiting Well journey.

• Health improvement or wellbeing managers
• Planned care/primary and community care
• Waiting list validation staff
• Key expert in areas of high wait (e.g. orthopaedics, mental health)
• Public health colleagues
• Key third sector community assets (including leisure trusts)

Prepare a Waiting Well workshop with your key stakeholders, to derive a collective solution. Ensure stakeholders are interested in attending a workshop and ask them to be prepared to come with offers. They need to be part of the solution, rather than merely attending to describe the problem.

Before the workshop consider:

Waiting times data

• Review local data on Discovery, Public Health Scotland (PHS) publications and find out:
  • Where are your major waits?
  • What impact does this have, for example, in terms of inequalities, outcomes etc?

Voice of your community

• What does their feedback tell you about their experiences? E.g. review feedback on Care Opinion.
• Consider how to hear the missing voices of the community.

During the workshop:

• Use the self-assessment questionnaire to agree what the current Waiting Well offer is, and where there are gaps.
• For each step of the Waiting Well pathway, think about how healthcare inequalities arise and how to mitigate them. Navigating our complex systems can make interfaces of care an area of risk for all patients. Especially for under-served and marginalised groups (such as people experiencing poverty, from ethnic minority backgrounds, with learning disability, with severe mental illness). This can lead to people to be 'missing' from healthcare, with significant unmet needs.

In the current financial and workforce climate, this is not about pilot funds for a side project. It is about seeing our services through a health equity lens and considering how we work as part of a wider community eco-system.

For example, the following groups could redirect some time each week to focus on Waiting Well services:

• Community link workers
• Welfare advisors
• Third sector organisations
• Leisure staff
• Current wellbeing service staff

Areas to focus on could include:

• Risk stratification of your main areas of need
• The people at highest risk of not Waiting Well

Examples of the what and how will be shared further on in this toolkit.