The Clackmannanshire and Stirling Health and Social Care Partnership is “consistently performing either at or above the national average”, Inspectors have found.

The Partnership has been inspected by the Care Inspectorate and Healthcare Improvement Scotland on the effectiveness of its strategic planning and commissioning of services.

It found that local staff are enthusiastic about the development of integrated working arrangements which aim to enable local people to live full and positive lives within supportive communities.

The report highlights a good history of engagement with service users and unpaid carers and involvement of clinical staff in supporting improvements and the development of systems to support closer working with GP clusters (groups of GP practices).

Inspectors also found robust systems are in place to collate and analyse data with the Partnership regularly benchmarking itself against comparator Partnerships and performing well against them.

Areas highlighted for improvement include increasing the pace of change including work at locality level and closer working with housing services.

Shiona Strachan, Chief Officer for Clackmannanshire and Stirling Health and Social Care Partnership said: “This inspection report recognises the solid foundations we’ve built to deliver high quality health and social care services across Clackmannanshire and Stirling.

“We recognise that there is more to do and we are also aware of the challenges ahead. The population of people aged over 75 in both Clackmannanshire and Stirling is forecast to increase at a higher rate than the rest of Scotland and we also have a number of communities with significant levels of deprivation.

“We therefore have to look at ambitious, effective and affordable ways of delivering local health and care services which are responsive to the needs of the local communities we serve.”