Get involved with Healthcare Improvement Scotland
Involving people in our work is an integral part of what we do.
We listen to and learn from the experiences of patients, carers and members of the public to help inform what we do and how we do it.
Healthcare Improvement Scotland has a number of volunteering opportunities, one of which might be of interest to you. We listen to and learn from the experiences of people with lived experience, carers and members of the public to help inform what we do and how we do it
We are part of the NHS in Scotland. Our job is to make sure that everyone in Scotland has the best possible health and care. To do this we need to hear from a broad range of people about their different experiences of health and social care. By volunteering in this role you can help us better represent public views in our work. This will help make sure our work really does make care better for everyone.
Interested in making health and care better for everyone? Want to get involved? We would love to hear from you!
We welcome volunteers from all parts of Scotland and from all walks of life. It is important to us that we are able to hear from people with a range of different experiences and identities. We are particularly keen to involve disabled people, people who are black, Asian or from a minority ethnic group and people who are living on low incomes as we know that any of these things can cause differences in people’s health.
We currently offer 2 volunteering roles: Public Partners and the People's Experience Volunteer role.
Public Partners
Public Partners work closely with Healthcare Improvement Scotland staff on ongoing projects, attending regular meetings and contributing their thoughts, ideas and questions to our work. Public Partners can be involved in a number of ways:
- providing an ongoing public perspective to our work developing guidelines and standards
- contributing to health technology assessments
- supporting improvement programmes, sharing good practice
- supporting us to meet our scrutiny role
- being a member of our reader panel to help make our publications more accessible.
Public Partners are recruited throughout the year depending on the opportunities available.
People's Experience Volunteers
The People's Experience Volunteer role is one way that we hope to better hear people’s views in our work. In time we aim to have People's Experience Volunteers across all parts of Scotland.
People's Experience Volunteers give feedback on specific questions about health and care, and have opportunities to:
- share views on what is important to people in their local areas for our work programmes
- find out how people read and understand our reports, websites or information about health and care
- help us improve how we engage with people across Scotland on a topic or a change. Volunteers can help to shape and test questions, test understanding of the topic and discover which things are most important to people.