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Visiting people
Our visits
The Commission visits people in a range of settings across Scotland. We visit individuals who are receiving care and treatment for a mental illness, learning disability or other disorder, such as dementia.
Most of our visits are planned with individuals and services. Some of our visits are unannounced. We produce reports on all of our service visits, so that people can learn from them and improve the care and treatment that they provide.
Why do we visit people?
Visiting people helps us to check the care and treatment people are getting, to see the kinds of places where care and treatment is provided and to hear how people feel about their care and treatment. Through direct contact with people who use and provide services, we get a very good picture of whether services are being provided in line with the law, policy and best practice.We can use this information to bring about immediate and longer term changes that improve the experience of individuals receiving care and treatment now and in the future.
Our visit programme targets people who we think are most at risk of having their rights overlooked. Each year we set out monitoring priorities these help us to decide some of the people we will visit.
Sometimes we visit people because a person has made a call to our advice and information line and raised serious concerns that we want to investigate.
We will also visit if an application for a guardianship order has been made and there are concerns about whether this is in a person's best interest.
What happens when we visit ?
When we visit people who are receiving care and treatment in a hospital, care home or other service, we will usually contact the service in advance and ask them to find out if anyone else wants to speak to our visiting team. We usually also contact local advocacy organisations and patients' councils. We will then meet with service users, advocates, carers and staff to find out about and discuss any particular issues for people using that service.
After a visit to people in a hospital, care home or other service we produce a report. Our local service visit reports identify any issues, action points and examples of good practice in the care received by those individuals we met. Our reports can highlight practice that might affect other people receiving care and treatment in the same service. We make recommendations and our staff follow up on these.
Sometimes our visits identify particular problems for individuals. Our staff might continue to stay involved in a case until we are satisfied that a person's care and treatment is line with the law.
