Scotland’s Public Service Reform Strategy has been published, setting out three commitments for Scottish public services: to be preventative, to better join up, and to be efficient. It outlines 18 workstreams covering areas such as leadership, cultural change, and understanding demand drivers; as well as data sharing, digital public services, digital skills, and intelligent automation.
Public service leaders will be relied upon to drive lasting change by addressing root causes and providing support early “to avoid long-term, complex and expensive interventions later”. First Minister John Swinney said: “Together we must be willing to be brave, to challenge ourselves to ensure we are delivering what the people of Scotland need and deserve. We need to take risks, to offer trust and give permission to act – that is a commitment from Scottish Government to our partners.”
A structured root cause analysis conducted to identify barriers to reform highlighted the need to strengthen joint decision making and sharing of resources, to better balance short term demands with long term solutions, to embed data and digital tools, and to promote data sharing.
For data, the government commits to building the maturity of organisations with “common digital components that encourage Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable data”, to help deliver targeted services and preventative support. Noting that data collection should be proportionate, and automated where possible, the government also promises to collect and publish information on corporate function costs of government and public bodies, and to use that information to drive efficiencies.
The digital public services workstream focuses on commitments to refresh the existing government digital strategy to accelerate digitisation, deliver efficiencies in public service operations from AI, and move more correspondence onto digital channels. “The NHS Digital Front Door, using the Scottish Government’s secure Mailbox service, will be piloted from December of this year,” it states. “By 2030 25% of all Scottish Government, agency and NDPB correspondence will be digital saving at least £100 million a year.”
For digital skills and resources, the government commits to offer better visibility on digital spend, ensure efficient use and re-use of digital assets, increase the use of shareable data, infrastructure and architecture, and accelerate the delivery of a digitally skilled workforce. This will be achieved both through the Scottish Digital Academy, and through the development of a capability toolkit to assess current workforce skills and identify any gaps.
The government also plans to scale intelligent automation. “The Scottish Government Intelligent Automation Centre of Excellence is transforming how public services are delivered – deploying AI enabled automation technologies to unlock capacity, reduce costs and improve the experience for citizens and staff,” it shares. Estimates for cost avoidance from this work range from £15 million to £21 million, it continues. Looking ahead, work will be focused on expanding intelligent automation as a shared service, launching a national collaborative procurement framework to promote access to automation expertise and solutions, and identifying opportunities to pilot the use of AI in public sector processes.
Digital transformation in health in Scotland
In a speech at the beginning of the year at the National Robotarium in Edinburgh, Scotland’s First Minister, John Swinney, outlined plans around innovation, the Scottish health and social care app, Hospital at Home, and “better use of data”, as well as the potential for new technologies such as AI and robotics to “modernise” health services and “transform” diagnosis and treatment.
NHS Scotland’s operational improvement plan was published in March, focusing on the roll-out of its health and social care app, the digital front door to health and care, taking a “stronger digital first approach”, and “further harnessing the benefits” of digital tech and innovation.
Earlier this month, NHS Scotland’s health boards launched a procurement for an integrated, cloud-based software-as-a-service solution for finance, HR, payroll and procurement processes, worth an estimated total value of £206 million.
