Digital and data strategy - Section 5 – Build in alignment

The Public Health Wales Long-Term Strategy is the wider strategy for our whole organisation, and what we do with digital and data needs to line up with what we do in each other area if we’re going to make a difference to people’s lives.

Using digital and data better is a priority in the long-term strategy, alongside health protection, improving health services, screening, better evidence and more.

There are milestones for the next few years that show some of what we’re going to do.

The long-term strategy is our link into other key national and international legislation and strategies like the  Wellbeing of Future Generations (external site) and the UN Sustainable development goals (external site).

Using recognised national and international standards and guidance will improve the way our services work and can connect to other services and organisations. We have a responsibility to ensure that our systems can talk to each other without risking safety, and that interoperability comes from using shared, open standards.

Aligning with international standards such as those recommended by the World Health Organisation and integrated through the WHO Collaboration Centre will allow us to benchmark against and collaborate with other countries to improve health and wellbeing around the world.

Aligning with standards in Wales ensures a focus on what is specific to people in Wales, like our Welsh language needs.

Using the NHS Wales data dictionary and HL7/FIHR for our data means we can exchange data with our NHS Wales family. Also, by using the same standards across Wales we can build confidence in the quality of our systems will be easier to integrate with other projects. Common ways of working will help us to work together better in the future.

We need to use national standards to govern our products too. When we publish data and statistics, they should meet the code of practice for statistics (external site). That way, people who look at our data can be assured that what they read has been produced to a high quality, is trustworthy, and is useful.

Using open standards isn’t just about the data and systems, it also means having clear, repeatable methods for our work and keeping clear documents to show what we have and govern our services well and fairly. Standards like ISO27001 for protecting data include particular skills and knowledge that our teams need to have and physical barriers or air-gapping to ensure security.

Service Standards

We will follow the 12 Service Standards outlined by the Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales

1. 1. Focus on the current and future wellbeing of people in Wales

1. 1. Design services in Welsh and English

1. 1. Understand users and their needs

1. 1. Provide a joined-up experience

1. 1. Make sure everyone can use the service

1. 1. Have an empowered service owner

1. 1. Have a multidisciplinary team

1. 1. Iterate and improve frequently

1. 1. Work in the open

1. 1. Use scalable technology

1. 1. Consider ethics, privacy and security throughout

1. 1. Use data to make decisions

We know that aligning our approach with wider NHS teams will make our services more efficient. For example, our NHS colleagues have just released the NHS Wales App. If we can develop services that can use that platform then we won’t have to design and build a mobile app for our own services.

There is so much effort and activity going into improving NHS Wales services right now and Public Health Wales is just one part of a much wider picture. So, whether we’re thinking about writing a new report, building a dashboard or transforming a digital service, it’s important that we know what else is on the horizon. It means we shouldn’t start something that has already been started elsewhere – instead we will add our effort to the existing work. By bringing our users needs and sharing our skills we will hopefully help to deliver something that works for everyone.

There is a project being run across Wales at the moment to link up our electronic prescribing – we need to ensure we are aligned with it so that we can continue our public health work in areas like monitoring Anti-Microbial resistance. If we do this well then people who prescribe will be able to see if they should prescribe different antibiotics to get the right effect.

We need to be really closely aligned to the Laboratory Information Systems programme. That’s because Public Health Wales runs the labs for hospitals in Wales, and we need to make sure that all our lab machines can talk to the new systems so that we can get the right results back to people as soon as possible.

The biggest digital and data programme across NHS Wales at the moment is the National Data Resource. It’s really exciting to think that soon we could have a new way of sharing information within the NHS in Wales to deliver better healthcare. We need to be able to meet our responsibilities as a node in this distributed network. Our registers of information should be easy for anyone in the NHS family to access for the right reasons.

Of course, aligning with NHS Wales is only a small part of the picture. We need to share information and align projects with our partners in the NHS in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. We need to benchmark our information with countries across the UK and Europe, and when there are epidemics we need to coordinate seamlessly across the UK and the world. The easier we can make it to share securely and swiftly, the more time we have to help the public manage sudden outbreaks of disease.

Registers

We looked at all of our registers to find whether there were core purposes common to all registers.

Overall, whether they are for disease or conditions we found a purpose common to all the registers that we keep is supporting the health and wellbeing of people in Wales.

But each of our registers is kept in a separate system at the moment. That means we have to collect some information lots of times and keep duplicates in different places. We think we can save time and have better information if we find the data that is the same across the registers and store that only once as a reference set.

Then we can test whether our information is being used to make a difference. If it is then we’ll know it’s useful to keep doing it. If not then we can move our effort elsewhere.

We want to share information efficiently and well, like we did during COVID, to encourage fair and equal access to our data in PHW and across the NHS. By reusing our data we can reduce the burden on services and service users. By creating and publishing good catalogues of our data and documenting our systems and architecture, people can find our data when they need to. We will put in place clear sharing agreements and governance processes so that we can make sure that access is for the right reasons and is safe, legal, and effective.

The assumption will be that we can share information for the public good, and it will be our responsibility to make sure it can be shared securely. We’ll design from the beginning with sharing in mind. In sharing openly and transparently, we increase the value of our services and earn the trust of others. This is what we mean by open by default, secure by design.

We’ll also need to make sure that digital services are an integrated part of each whole service, not separated. The products we offer should be available to everyone. No one in Wales should be impaired or unable to get services because of the way we deliver things. That means we need to find more ways to listen to people who could or should use our services but don’t.