About this toolkit

This toolkit has been developed for use by healthcare staff in Scotland to support them to deliver high-quality, safe, person-centred care. The framework is evidence-based and designed to support staff to deliver and assure care using the 16 key elements outlined. This resource can be viewed on mobile devices so you can access it in different ways depending on your setting.

Excellence in Care programme: phs.excellenceincare@phs.scot

The toolkit has been signed off by internal governance structures within Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS) in April 2026. The Excellence in Care (EiC) National Team will oversee the ongoing development of the toolkit and the EiC leadership team will take decisions about ongoing development and updating of the toolkit. Decisions about substantial updates and developments will be escalated to internal clinical governance groups for approval if required.

There will be regular reviews of the toolkit content informed by delivery and governance groups, in line with HIS policy.

To inform the development and review of the EiC Framework, academic literature and national guidance was systematically searched and reviewed.

This resource has been successfully approved through organisational governance structures prior to publication. Ongoing updates will be approved by the EiC leadership team and more substantial decisions will be escalated to internal clinical governance groups for approval.

This toolkit will be reviewed and updated in line with HIS policy. Major updates to the toolkit will be approved by the EiC leadership team and the identified governance groups.

This toolkit does not make reference to medicines and therefore does not require sign-off from local Area Drug and Therapeutics Committees or equivalent national bodies.

The following actions have been carried out to assure the quality of the toolkit:

• Risks to safety of patients/service users have been assessed. As this is not a clinical therapeutic toolkit, no such risks were identified.
• Functional testing, usability testing and user acceptance testing have been carried out.
• A plan has been defined for monitoring and acting on feedback and complaints (see section below to submit feedback or complaints)

© Healthcare Improvement Scotland 2026 This toolkit is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. This allows for the copy and redistribution of this toolkit as long as Healthcare Improvement Scotland is fully acknowledged and given credit. The material must not be remixed, transformed or built upon in any way. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

All content within the toolkit has been checked for compliance with copyright legislation and permission to embed content from external sources has been obtained where required.

An accessibility check of the content and toolkit was conducted on 26/06/2026 using the RDS standard operating procedure. The accessibility of the RDS platform technology is confirmed in the RDS accessibility statement at the bottom of each webpage.

The EiC team will follow the for handling complaints which is based on the NHS Model Complaints Handling Procedure.

Feedback and complaints should be sent to the EiC team mailbox where they will be processed and responded to in accordance with relevant procedures.

The Excellence in Care framework is the result of extensive collaborative input from a wide range of stakeholders and partners across the health, care and education systems. The input has been instrumental in reviewing and updating to stay relevant and practical for today’s multi professional teams and would not have been possible with the support of the following:

• The Excellence in Care (EiC) National Team and Programme Board
• Our Public Partners–Family Representatives of the Vale of Leven Hospital Inquiry
• The Scottish Government/Chief Nurses Officers Directorate (CNOD)
• The EiC Board Clinical Leads
• The EiC eHealth Leads
• Public Health Scotland
• Scottish Patient Safety Collaborative
• Scottish Executive Nurse Directors
• EiC Hub Attendees
• Healthcare Improvement Scotland representatives