CfSD Delivery Principles
The CfSD annual plan for 2025/26 includes individual workplans for all our National Programmes.
It also includes 8 delivery principles that the workplan is based on. These principles help guide the overarching strategic development of CfSD and the prioritisation of its work.
Clinical Leadership Model
Providing robust, credible clinical leadership is key to ensuring that CfSD can support effective and sustainable transformation across NHS Scotland. CfSD ensures that all improvement work is clinically-led. This includes national clinical leads who provide specific expertise and understanding around a speciality or improvement area, and CfSD National Associate Clinical Directors who ensure that the improvement work takes a whole system approach that is aligned with broader improvement and recovery of NHS Scotland.
Speciality or Strategic Delivery Groups
Speciality or Strategic Delivery Groups (SDGs) are designed to bring together key multidisciplinary stakeholders from across Scotland, including both clinical and operational leadership. This provides a practical mechanism to enable clinically led, locally relevant service redesign and transformation that is capable of addressing key challenges within a specific speciality or improvement area.
Board Engagement
CfSD Champions have been embedded within each territorial Health Board. The CfSD champions act as a key conduit between the Boards and CfSD. They are designed to help facilitate relationships between CfSD and local operational teams and to support the implementation of improvement opportunities. To support this process, there are regular Board engagement meetings between senior CfSD staff and the local board CfSD champions, which are aimed at highlighting additional improvement opportunities and identifying solutions to any current challenges.
Promoting and Embedding Best Practice
All CfSD Programme Teams have a focus on developing and delivering best practice to support the delivery of care, reducing unwarranted variation across services and ensuring best practice is embedded across NHS Scotland. This includes work to optimise and maximise capability and capacity across NHS Scotland, and to ensure that patients are treated by the right clinician, in the right setting, at the right time. This avoids waste and enables rapid access to treatment to those who need it most. This includes work designed to deploy and optimise national pathways across Scotland, and to balance national service capacity with current demand for services.
Primary/Secondary Care Engagement
CfSD works closely with primary care stakeholders to help build and sustain stronger relationships between primary care and secondary care. This includes identifying opportunities to implement and improve person centred pathways and other innovations and improvements across primary and secondary care.
Enhance Staff Capability and Capacity
We identify and maximise opportunities for staff upskilling, including working with NHS Scotland Academy and NHS Education Services to develop future workforce models. This includes taking into account the demands of the changing health and care environment and new ways of working.
Provision of Expert Advice and Analysis
The CfSD will work collaboratively with Health Boards and other key stakeholders to provide the Scottish Government with aggregated advice and analysis relating to national improvement actions, opportunities and themes. This will help inform the development of national plans to support planned care, unscheduled care and other key areas across NHS Scotland.
Share, promote and publish knowledge and achievements
CfSD aims to become an internationally recognised unit for supporting transformation and system change. To do this, we will identify and explore opportunities to promote and share our knowledge and achievements. This will include publishing research and learning that demonstrates and evidences the value, impact and benefits realisation of our programmes and helps promote the adoption of best practice.