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Section 2 - Summary

 

On this page:

 - Build on Strong Foundations

 - Build in Alignment

 - Build to Make a Difference

 - Our Principles

This strategy tries to balance the needs of a lot of groups. To give a fair weight to each area, we have chosen three broad areas to frame our work. Within these three areas we will keep coming back to the five priorities that the most people said were important.

Our Three areas are:

 Build on strong foundations 

We will strengthen each of the core areas that will be the foundation for digital and data transformation in Public Health Wales. 

  • Empowered people – we will listen to people who use each service before we start new work, and all the way through the work, so our services meet their needs.
  • Empowered professionals – we will work with other NHS organisations to bring the professional framework for digital and data closer to other sectors. We’ll bring together communities of practice and actively develop more ways to share knowledge and improve.
  • Safe data – combining cyber security and modern data processes to be responsible guardians for sensitive personal data.
  • Visible landscape – our systems and our data should have clear maps and catalogues, so that anyone who needs to can find out the owner of a system or the location of the information they need.
  • Good quality – Our data and our systems should have a good enough quality that they can be used without workarounds or manual checking. We will try to find ways to make the data we use better for all the people who need to use it. We will make sure people can understand what data is available and what it says.

Build in Alignment 

This strategy does not exist in a vacuum. There is a wider Public Health Wales Long Term Strategy , and connected to that are the Wellbeing of Future Generations and the UN Sustainable development goals that aim to help meet the needs of the people in Wales and around the world. That means we need to have:

  • Shared standards – by using national or international standards for our data and digital products and services people can easily link with us and understand us. These standards could include:
  • Shared components – it takes a long time to build something from start to finish. But there are lots of things we do that share processes. By finding what is the same in many services and products, we can spend more time working on one really good solution and use it for more than one solution.
  • Align with other programmes – there are components being made across the NHS in Wales like the NHS Wales App. If those components meet a need then we should use them
  • Intelligent customer – we need to use new Laboratory Information Systems, e-Prescribing systems, the National Data Resource and more. In each case, they will meet some of the needs of Public Health Wales so we need to be a responsible, intelligent partner during the programmes.
  • To build products that maximise our delivery and achievement of the Public Health Wales Long-term strategy 

Build to make a difference

We can make a measurable difference to health and wellbeing through powerful, actionable data and analysis, and innovative, efficient digital tools and systems.

  • Create together – We need to make what people need.
  • Be where people are – We will work and publish in places where people who need us can find us
  • Agile mindset, pragmatic design – We will continue our use of rapid cycles of development and delivering things that are “good enough” so that they can be used in a timely manner.
  • Embrace new things – We will make the most of the data we look after to benefit the public in their health and wellbeing. We need to consider new sources of information such as wearable technology, activity monitoring, analysis of health and healthy activities and better ways to share information and advice with the people of Wales. We can also make better use of new digital and technology services, like Cloud hosting for our analytics and processing, better remote accessibility
  • Use AI carefully – AI technology is a long way off being able to replace humans. It still, legally, ethically, and technically, requires human oversight. Even so, it has an important role to play in health and care, alongside human skills and expertise. Using the right sort of AI carefully and well can free up time for specialists to spend in direct interactions with people.
  • Measure influence – We will track our impact, examining how our data is being used by us and others to make a difference to people health and wellbeing 

We will evaluate our digital and data innovations to understand if what we do is making a difference to the health and wellbeing of people in Wales, and where it is not to learn, adapt and improve. 

Our principles

Inside all three areas, we will keep coming back to the principles that mean the most to our teams. These principles were developed by people from across Public Health Wales

  • People first – our services start and end with people, because improving public health and wellbeing is at the heart of what we do. We appreciate and value the public. We also appreciate and value the people who build and run our services, because to deliver great services we need great teams.
     
  • Accessible, fair, and equal – everyone who needs our services should be able to find and use them. We want to design and build our services so that nothing about a person's needs is a barrier to them using our services.
     
  • Open by default, secure by design – in sharing what we can openly and transparently, we increase the value of our services and earn the trust of others.
     
  • Efficient: we re-use what we can, we remove copies and make reusable components so we have fewer things to look after. We make the best use of what we have. We can use different methods like Agile and Lean to test and try ideas in faster, cheaper ways.
  • Focussed on the future – we turn data into insights that we can use to make decisions. We make systems and services that people can use in ways that work best for them.