It’s no secret that the operating context surrounding the delivery of social care services over the past three years has been a challenging one. But with challenge comes opportunity.

The ongoing integration of health and social care provides a largely as yet untapped opportunity for providers to redefine the way that we create and deliver services which help people to live good lives.

Supporting people to live well goes hand in hand with helping individuals to achieve excellent health outcomes, and this must be reflected in the skill sets of the professionals being paid to support some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

Today, people who have a learning disability are still more likely to die 20 years earlier than people who do not have a learning disability. Significant health inequalities continue to contribute towards this alarming statistic – in part caused by an ongoing lack of access to universal health care services and limited support for people who have a learning disability to make good choices in relation to their diet and active lifestyles.

Looking forward, we need to think differently about how we develop our social care workforce to effectively support people to overcome these challenges, which are traditionally related to healthcare issues.

The Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act 2014 created the legislative framework required to drive this shift towards a different way of working through the integration of health and social care services. Three years down the line, we have seen positive progress as the infrastructure required to support the integration agenda has been created. However, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the Public Bodies Act was created with people at its heart – and driven by the objective of truly joining up health and social care services to improve the quality and consistency of services for individuals and their families.

For this reason, at Enable Scotland, we have started to explore new ways of working which will ensure our staff have the skills and knowledge they need to support and realise the person-centred objectives of the Public Bodies Act. As part of this process, and in line with the vision for achieving true health and social care integration, we have begun to share our expertise with healthcare practitioners – effectively supporting the longer-term aspiration of the legislation to move specialist healthcare roles, such as Learning Disability Nurses, away from hospitals and other institutionalised healthcare settings into local communities.

This week, we were delighted to announce our innovative new partnership with Glasgow Caledonian University’s (GCU) School of Health and Life Sciences. Through this partnership, student learning disability nurses will work with Enable Scotland social care staff to gain practical experience of supporting health outcomes in a social care setting. They will also have the opportunity to work closely with people who receive support in the community and participate in the process of designing truly personalised support services that deliver choice and control for each individual to live the life they choose.

This exciting partnership will facilitate greater collaboration, with the GCU students and Enable Scotland practitioners working side-by-side with the university’s academics and researchers to assess current models of support and explore innovative new ways of working.

Through this and other work, we aspire to grasp the opportunities of integration, and transform our current practice to ensure that Enable Scotland is playing its part in equipping the health and social care workforce of today with the skills that they will need for tomorrow.

Theresa Shearer is chief executive of Enable Scotland