Digital and data strategy - Section 4 – Building on stronger foundations

Our organisation is starting to move from focusing on what we do to what people need. So rather than just delivering information or services to people in Wales, we look at how to work with you to design and deliver what you need.

We have started to build a design and research team that focusses on people/users. By users, we mean the people who use and benefit from our products and services. As well as the existing Time to talk: Public Health panel we are going to start user panels that can provide a rolling group who represent a fair and equal mix of those who use our products and services.

We will make user research (observing and listening to people who use a product or service) the starting point for every project, and make sure that the people who lead and run our services are able to work closely with user researchers. By looking at the way a person experiences screening or vaccination or health advice, we can make their journey easier and hopefully have a better effect.

It’s really important that data and digital professionals are involved in the conversation and co-creation that we do with service users, alongside service owners and communicators.

Skill levels

• Awareness – a person with awareness has learnt about a skill but has not practiced with it.
• Working Knowledge – a person has some theoretical and some practical skill experience, but may need supervision or support to deliver safely and successfully
• Practitioner – a person has significant knowledge and experience and can undertake a range of specialist work.
• Expert– a person is a deep technical specialist in this area. They are probably acknowledged in their field and have extensive experience either working or researching in this area.

We should empower our teams to deliver things together, whether that’s providing a service or solving a problem. That means giving them the right tools and skills to do their jobs and the trust and space to let them get on with it.

Our data and digital capabilities rely on us having people with a range of very technical specialities. Just like in medicine, where a junior surgeon and a senior kidney nurse have different levels of experience and knowledge, we need the right mix of digital, data and technology (DDaT) professionals. We also need to make sure that Public Health Wales is a desirable place for specialists at different stages in their careers to come and work and develop.

In order to have more opportunities to align our specialists across sectors, we are working with other NHS Wales bodies to create a digital and data profession framework. In the meantime, the definitions (external site) are a good marker.

Alongside the framework, there is a lot of work to do to help our new communities find their voice and develop their skills. We’ll build communities of practice to share knowledge and experience. We’ll use blogs and regular sessions like lunch-and-learns to share what we’re doing and get talks from external experts. We’ll encourage contributions from people in other professions in Public Health Wales, and DDaT professionals from other organisations outside NHS Wales to learn new things, stay up to date and keep connected.

It’s also important to accept that we won’t be able to do everything ourselves. Sometimes we will need to work with partners across the NHS, in academia, the wider public sector or in the private sector, to make use of skills we don’t have yet or to deliver a specific project that we don’t have enough people for. When we do work with others, we’ll welcome them as partners, trust them to work with us and respect their professional skills. And every time we work with partners, we’ll share knowledge and skills, so we can learn and develop together.

You expect the NHS to protect your personal data while it is in our care. You also expect that we will keep correct information about you and that we share data within the NHS to provide excellent health care. Public Health Wales is committed to a continuing programme of cyber security for our networks, systems, data and infrastructure.

We believe people work best when they can get on with their work and their tools and processes are helpful.

If we really want to have better services, we need a clear map of all the services we have. It needs to be easy to read and understand so that all of our teams and partners can use it. It needs to be easy to update so that we can maintain it even when we’re busy.

We’ve recently completed an architecture review – a review of our systems and made a high-level map of everything. We should share our maps with other NHS Wales organisations so that they can see how our systems connect to theirs.

The next steps will be to make maps inside each of our systems at the container level, and then for the components in each of them. We’ll also make maps for the data that goes through our systems so that we can find where to have the best impact on its quality. We’ll keep using open methods for mapping like the C4 approach (external site) so that our maps can be read and used without difficulty.

Our discoveries showed us that we could improve by having common sets of tools that could be used for multiple systems, making it easier to share our skills across multiple areas. For instance, at the moment in Public Health Wales we use more than 10 different tools for statistical analysis and showing data. Although each tool has been brought in for the best reasons, it means that we can’t easily share our analyses or our skills. It means we need to do the same things in lots of slightly different ways, and what we publish looks a bit different each time.

We should have consistent policies across the organisation. When we choose a data tool or a group of tools it needs to work for everyone, and we should all agree on the same place for the decision to get made. Having standard tools makes it easier for us to share resources in times of need – more people can help if there is a standard way of working that we can understand easily. The same goes for digital systems. Where several areas need a case management system, we can work together to try and find one case management system that we can implement and use for all of us.

We want to have as few tools as possible for each component of what we do. Lots of our services need to get information in from other places. So we could have a common set of tools to get information from other systems, check that it’s in the right format and load it into our systems (often called Extract, Transform, Load, or ETL). We could have a common component for sending messages between systems, one for making simulations and so on.

We know that for the foreseeable future, some of our systems and components will be proprietary and some will be open source. We need to get those components to work in harmony and share smoothly between each other. That means having a good relationship between our partners and our developers so that we can integrate as flexibly as possible. Some components are going to be for all of Wales, like the appointment service or NHS Wales App. We’ll need to make sure our own services can use them when they get released – we’ll do that by working closely with the developers, knowing which of our components will connect and having the skills to plug them in.

To make changes to our foundations is going to take time. If we are really going to consider the needs of all the users, including members of the public, members of PHW and other people who use our data or digital services, then when we make changes to a service, we’ll need to have commitment from all those groups to get involved and contribute.

We plan to improve the way our data is collected, stored and transformed so that it can be found and used more easily. Our data should be available in open, standard formats, so that it can be easily shared with other things, like individual Electronic Health Records or GP systems.

We should use the best practices and the best tools to collect, store, analyse and process our data.

To ensure data is secured and protected throughout its lifecycle, we’ll use techniques such as encryption, anonymisation, and access controls.

To move away from silos, we will bring our data into central repositories that can exist easily in the cloud or on our premises. Holding our data centrally will help us manage it more securely and access the data more easily. We can make it even better by developing our data catalogue, which shows what data we have available, in what formats, who owns it and where it is kept. We will also need to make sure we keep good data about the data (metadata), for example, defining the different variables, describing how it was collected, advice on the strengths and weaknesses of the data and so on.

From there we can improve the quality of our data by running automatic and manual tests. We can find out if there is data missing from an entry and compare it to other places in the organisation or the wider NHS to see if there are bits that are the same or different. We can reduce the burden on our live systems and databases if all of our data is together and accessed in the same way, so that they can run faster and have fewer mistakes.

Our analytical data should be managed according to the FAIR principles (external site) – findable, accessible, interoperable and repeatable. Instead of spending time manually extracting data to analyse, we’ll set up “Reproducible analytical pipelines” that can be set up to extract the same data at a fixed time every day, week, month, etc. Using these we can improve public health outcomes by enabling more timely analysis. That means our insights will be closer to the time of events, and give us improved monitoring and surveillance, better early warning and other insights that we can turn into actions. Using this as a base we can move to support precision public health and take on other innovative technologies.

We will publish data products that are designed to support decision-making and planning. We will not only publish the data, but also independent and unbiased interpretation which helps people to understand what is happening, why it is happening, and what is important. We will report the story as well as the numbers, so that what we do is useful for all our users, so that they can take the right action.