Should people who use care services be treated with respect? Should everyone be treated equally? If you say what kind of treatment or care you would like, should that view be respected? Should services used by children and the elderly be safe?
The answers may be self-evident, but in hospitals, doctors' surgeries, social work departments, nurseries and care homes, they cannot always be taken for granted.
Complaints upheld by the Care Inspectorate (CI) and reports from Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS) show that services sometimes fall short of the mark. So the Scottish Government is currently revising its national care standards, which will set out what people can expect from all health and social care settings. Ministers plan to develop generic standards which all services must abide by as well as more specialist standards for individual types of care.
The agencies involved have now launched a further consultation (one has already been held, which found that people wanted the care standards to uphold human rights, they should be streamlined and accessible, and that agencies such as CI and HIS should enforce them). Anyone with any interest or involvement in health and social care - especially those on the receiving end, but also those working in the sector - is being asked to take part in a survey.
What will it find out? Well, a limited amount if people stick to the pretty anaemic headline questions ("Do you agree you are entitled to be treated with compassion?"; "Do you agree that services should be responsive?") but there is scope to be much more forthcoming in the attached comment boxes.
It will be in the detail that any new care standards become meaningful. How will the standards stop poor quality care homes leaving elderly people sitting for too long in front of the telly? Will they ensure nurseries have attentive staff who engage with children? Will hospital patients be able to use them to address problems such as long waits for admission or discharge?
Some of the difficult questions already posed by the first consultation have yet to be answered. While most people supported the broad brush principles of the standards, others raised crucial questions. Will the resources be there to deliver on the good intentions? This is a very live question for care homes, for example, trying hard to recruit good staff while being nailed to the wall on cost. And how will people be told what the standards are, so they can insist on them in a crisis?
The new standards are to be rolled out from 2017. In the mean time, anyone who wants to influence them can do so at www.newcarestandards.scot, until December 10.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here