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Visiting people
Our visits
The Commission visits people in a range of settings throughout 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.
What happens when we visit ?
When we visit services we will usually contact the service in advance and ask them to find out if anyone 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.
After a service visit we produce a report. Our visit reports identify any issues and action points for service providers. These will be followed up by our staff. Sometimes our visits identify particular problems for individuals. We might decide to try and resolve these by one of our practitioners taking the issue up as part of their casework.
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.
