How will we know when we’re there or if we’re going in the right direction? We will evaluate!
In each of our three areas, we will measure whether we are progressing, and we will consider whether the work we do is aligning with the 5 principles.
Evaluation will help us to understand our progress towards the goals of this strategy, and to identify the mechanisms which are contributing to our success or acting as barriers to us moving forwards.
We will develop an evaluation plan which captures progress in line with the 5 guiding principles of this strategy and use the information we collect from the evaluation to inform how we work in the future. Some questions might be:
And of course, using the digital service standards and the data publication standards that we are committed to will provide many opportunities to evaluate and assess our progress.
We will collect the evidence to help us understand these questions through different approaches for example talking to our people, surveys with our service users, case studies and ensuring we hear from a range of people who are representative of the population in Wales we serve.
And then we will start the next iteration.
In order to make shared decisions about what is most important for our digital and data teams to do, we are developing a Digital and Data Design Authority (DDDA). This is a group where individuals from every part of Public Health Wales come together to share responsibility for deciding what is most important to do first.
Making decisions about priority will encourage us to be aware of each other’s needs and to share our resources and knowledge based on the needs of the wider organisation. Shared ownership of decisions at a working level will lead to more collaboration when solving shared problems. We will also share accountability for spending public money wisely, by assessing the work that gets done against national standards. By putting the group at the level of people who are doing the work, we get a clear view of which parts of PHW have the same needs – so we won’t build new things more than once.
The Digital and Data Design Authority will support people creating services fit for purpose in an organisation where digital and data are fundamental in the ways of working. In line with the terms of reference the DDDA will offer guidance to meeting the Welsh public sector service design principles and the UK Technology Code of Practice.
In order to make the what happen, we need to look at the how.
We are going to take lots of little steps rather than a few big steps. That’s because there are a lot of different ways to achieve an outcome, but not all of them will work for us, or for the people we serve. With digital services or data products, it is often more useful to get a small thing up and running to see what it does than to spend a long time trying to figure out what will work before testing anything.
The strategy will be delivered both through the normal business of Public Health Wales and in partnership with collaborating organisations such as Welsh Government, other NHS Wales organisations and wider national and international partners.
Each time we do a piece of work, we’re likely to find out some pain points for users. By examining what makes it hard for people to do what they need to do, we can find where a change is likely to make a difference.
Broadly, if we do it right, it should result in healthier, happier people, or more people being served, or fewer people needing to be served in the NHS.
We’re going to prioritise the work we need to do in the next few months. We’ll start applying for funding for work we can’t afford to do ourselves at the moment. We’ll share our strategy and see what other parts of Wales are planning, so that we don’t accidentally duplicate anything.
After we’ve done that, we’ll try to learn from what we’ve done, change according to what we’ve learnt and then do it again.
We’ll do that for 12 months; see how we go and then revisit our strategy. If it’s still working and still seems like the right approach, we’ll scan the horizon and start another round. If it’s not delivering the results we need, we’ll do some more user research and try a different way.
As we mentioned to begin, if there’s anything you think we can change to improve this strategy we welcome you to get in touch and let us know. You can explore more around the strategy here and contact us through [insert link here].