The Big Change pillar is focused on progressing national social care programmes, ensuring alignment and integration with relevant health programmes, and influencing national digital social care policy and funding. This will help support the effective use of digital and data to enable social care reform across Wales.
As part of this work, we are undertaking discovery and mapping to better understand existing initiatives and the challenges currently facing the social care sector. We are particularly keen to hear from local authorities and independent care providers who are undertaking service improvement programmes where digital and data are central to enabling change. If you can share any details, please email disccymru@wlga.gov.uk. A key purpose of this work is to develop an understanding of the types of initiatives being undertaken, and where there are opportunities to scale good practice or encourage wider collaboration—regionally and nationally. We also want to understand how initiatives are funded and supported, to inform recommendations on how technology-enabled service improvement could be funded in the future.
In addition, we are running two specific discovery exercises focused on priority national challenges:
- Technology Enabled Care (TEC) – We are asking local authorities and regions to provide details of Technology Enabled Care programmes designed to support more proactive care models. This includes telecare, remote monitoring and virtual care initiatives. The aim is to understand how widely these technologies are being used across Wales, and the barriers to implementation. If you have not yet had the opportunity to share details of your work, please email disccymru@wlga.gov.uk. This work is being led by the WLGA, with subject matter expert support from NHS Performance and Improvement (including TEC Cymru) on behalf of the DISC Partnership.
- Procurement of digital tools and services in social care – We have initiated a discovery exercise to gauge what improvements may be needed to procurement processes for digital tools and services across social care and the wider care sector. This work will explore what is currently being procured, and how the sector could be supported to procure more efficiently and effectively. Survey invitations have been issued to a range of colleagues across social care and the care sector. We would like to hear from a broad cross-section of colleagues, so if you would like to contribute during March, please email disccymru@wlga.gov.uk. This work is being undertaken on behalf of the DISC Partnership by Ethos Chain, an experienced procurement advisory service that has also supported the Connecting Care programme. A sponsorship group is overseeing the discovery work, including local authority and ADSS representation. A Show and Tell session is planned for the end of March and into the new financial year
We fully recognise that there are currently many information and survey requests circulating across the system. However, we hope colleagues will recognise the value of these discovery exercises in helping us develop the Digital in Social Care programme. Linked to the wider challenge of reporting burden, and as part of the Local Government Data Audit, we will also undertake work to understand the scale of the ongoing issues that data reporting cycles can create for already overstretched council teams. These processes can require significant time to extract, assemble, validate, collate and submit returns to Welsh Government and regulators.
The discovery phase of this audit will begin in March and continue through April and May. The work will focus on the education and planning sectors, as well as social care. If you would like to know more, please contact digitalteam@wlga.gov.uk.