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Background

2. The PIN Guidelines have been produced by guideline development groups with membership drawn from management, trade unions, professional associations and human resource specialists. The aim of the PIN Guidelines is to achieve fair and consistent best practice standards for the management of staff across the NHS in Scotland.

3. Our National Health: A Plan for Action, A Plan for Change includes a commitment to establish a new Staff Governance standard. Performance against the new standard will be assessed by the Scottish Partnership Forum and local partnership forums and form an integral part of the new performance and accountability framework being developed as part of Our National Health.

Action

4. Chief Executives and General Managers of all Health Boards and Trusts must ensure that their organisations have policies in place locally which embrace the values and principles set out in the PIN Guidelines.

5. The Guidelines include model policies which are intended to inform the development of local policies and procedures in partnership with Local Partnership Forums or other equivalent forums.

Copies of the Report

6. Copies of the Guidelines are being sent to all Chairs, Chief Executives, General Managers, Directors of Human Resources and Staff Side Chairs of Local Partnership Forums. Sufficient copies have been sent to Directors of Human Resources to ensure that each member of the Local Partnership Forum can be issued with a personal copy of each guideline.

7. To ensure the widest possible access to the full Guidelines, they are available on the PIN Website, which can be found on the Scottish Partnership Forum Site on the Scottish Health on the Web site [http://www.show.scot.nhs.uk]

Yours sincerely

Robin Naysmith
Director of Human Resources (Acting)