Commissioning services for people with learning disabilities in Scotland: linking evidence and practice

This paper describes how guidance about good practice for commissioning services for people with learning disabilities was developed in Scotland. • Helping people with learning disabilities to live in their own homes or in other homely settings has been a major shift in government policy and practice in the last 10 years in Scotland and in the rest of the UK. Commissioners from local authorities and from National Health Service services have the responsibility for organising good quality care, within a budget and within other constraints. Commissioners also have to develop professional relationships with organisations from the statutory, voluntary and private sectors, involved in commissioning. These are very demanding roles for commissioners. • Although commissioning is a complex process, the main goal and steps involved in achieving that goal are well understood: to get from the starting point of what the person with learning disabilities and commissioners ideally want, to the end point of good outcomes that can be sustained. The development of a set of suggested steps in this process and a number of key questions at each step are described in this paper.