Adult Support and Protection

Crowd in central Glasgow

For the past five years Iriss has been involved in supporting the Adult Support and Protection (ASP) community in Scotland. Through funding and support from the ASP team in the Scottish Government we have been leading on a number of initiatives that support data and evidence use, and learning and development. This aligns with the ASP Improvement Plan, most explicitly the sections on Data and Information and Practice Improvement.

We have the hope that through this work, people working in and around ASP will:

  • Feel more connected and better supported to improve and change.
  • Have increased opportunities for learning and reflection.
  • Have a better understanding of what best practice looks like in ASP and how to make it happen in practice.
  • Understand the local and systemic barriers to good practice and how to address these.

Over the last three years we have developed a number of resources:

Over this time, other work has been continuing to: develop and deliver a minimum dataset for areas across Scotland to use; collate and summarise the biennial reports that come from ASP Committees across Scotland; support the national ASP Implementation group; and design and write the annual data survey. We also currently maintain the public facing Act Against Harm website, helping people understand what harm can be, and crucially, where to go to get help. 

In 2024/25 we will be continuing much of this work, including working in the area of chronologies in ASP, further developing the LSI work, and publishing an online repository for national and local learning and training materials related to ASP topics and processes.

We continue to have the National Adult Support and Protection Coordinator (NASPC), Brenda Walker working alongside us at Iriss. Her role is to support national innovation and improvement in relation to outcomes, activities and measures linked to the governance of ASP. You can keep up with some of her activities on the NASPC website. You can also see the video of the speakers from the first ASPire conference held in February 2024.

If you have any questions about this area of work please contact our Head of Programmes, Stuart Muirhead, at stuart.muirhead@iriss.org.uk.

Improving chronology practice in ASP

Case studies

A focus on chronologies has been core to our ASP workstream this year. We’ve been working closely with the Chronologies Implementation Subgroup. This is one of four subgroups in support of the ASP National Implementation Group, formed to support both national and local implementation of the revisions of the Adult Support and Protection (Scotland) Act 2007 Code of Practice.