Brilliant
basics

Identifying key challenges and putting the key digital building blocks in place to underpin essential data, skills, and processes.

Brilliant basics

Know your customer

Know your service

Know your people and skills

Know your data

Identifying and understanding the key challenges

The Brilliant Basics pillar is centred on identifying and understanding the key challenges and needs of both the people delivering social care and those receiving it, so that we can put the right digital building blocks in place to make best use of data and make services easier to access and easier to deliver.

This will be achieved by embedding a user-centred approach, data-driven practices, and digital skills across the sector, so that teams can take advantage of digital to effectively drive service improvement. These are the foundations for better digital services, better social care, better lives.

We’ll know we have succeeded when:

People experience better and more efficient social care services.
Services are developed in response to evidence, avoiding time wasted on solutions that are not needed or not fit for purpose.
Digital tools free up time for frontline teams and empowering them to deliver high-quality care, with feedback showing these tools are genuinely helpful.
Staff have the skills and access to information needed to take advantage of digital opportunities and support those they care for.
Staff can easily find and use the information they need to do their jobs and support the people they care for.
Services improve continuously and visibly, driven by data insights.
The sector attracts and retains talented individuals by fostering a culture that values recruitment, retention, and ongoing professional development, ensuring stability and improvement within the workforce.

Objectives

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Know your customer

This element is about understanding the needs, experiences, and expectations of people who access services. It encourages the adoption of user-centred design approaches to ensure services are accessible, inclusive, and genuinely meet user needs. Focus will be on priority services identified in ‘Know your Service’.

Objective 1: Identify Pain Points and Barriers

Work collaboratively with key partners to undertake user research for specific identified services.

Objective 2: Design Inclusive and Accessible Services

Identify opportunities for training social care staff in accessibility.
Best practice / what good looks like (Building Knowledge Pillar 4).

Know your service

This element is about understanding how services currently operate. It involves using process mapping to identify what is working, as well as the key challenges and problems. By mapping the current state (“as is”) and defining the desired future state (“to be”), it becomes possible to identify where improvements can be most impactful, and support continuous improvement based on evidence gathered.

Objective 1: Prioritise and Map Key Service Areas

Evaluate the Police Problem Book model to establish whether it can be adapted to prioritise issues and uncover inefficiencies across social care services.
Commission a discovery to establish existing process mapping activity, best practice and opportunities.
Analyse service delivery processes (Connecting Care programme) to identify opportunities for standardisation and efficiency, informing a broader strategy for integrated care and targeted investment via Big Change Pillar 1.

Objective 2: ‘To Be’ and Best Practice

Using outcomes of objective 1, identify exemplar services and processes that inform priorities for service redesign.
Share best practice, identified by objective 1, within the Building Knowledge Pillar 4.
Identify opportunities for training social care staff in user research and service mapping.

Know your people and skills

This element is about understanding the workforce’s current digital confidence, skills, and capacity. It builds on key recommendations from the Social Care Wales (SCW) Digital Potential Tool assessment and the ADSS Copilot readiness assessment, as well as other relevant research and projects as they are identified.

The goal is to develop a confident, capable workforce that’s ready to engage with digital transformation and continuous learning.

Objective 1: Assess Digital Confidence and Gaps

Use findings from digital skills assessments to inform the development of targeted support and training plans.

Objective 2: Develop Tailored Support and Training

Engage social care leaders to co-create a leadership competency framework grounded in sector needs and evidence.
Design training aligned with this framework, including mentoring, peer support, and user centred design (UCD).
Define and document standards for good digital practice in social care, establishing benchmarks for digital maturity, effective service delivery, and workforce capabilities.
Use the established standards to review existing training and develop targeted learning pathways, ensuring professional development is relevant, evidence-based, and meets identified needs.

Objective 3: Embed Digital Capability into Practice

Align training with real-world service improvement needs, ensuring staff can apply digital skills to improve.
Draw on insights from across the Brilliant Basics pillars to improve digital capability.

Know your data

This element is about building strong data foundations to support better decision-making and service improvement. The focus is on ensuring data is consistent, clean, and reliable, so it accurately reflects what’s happening in practice.

By understanding what data exists, how it’s used, and where gaps exist, we can base service improvements on facts rather than assumptions. Establishing robust data standards and practices creates a clearer picture of performance, supports accountability, and enables smarter, more confident planning.

This approach also supports the adoption of standards like FHIR that enable integration and collaboration across health and social care, supporting seamless journeys where people never have to share their information unnecessarily.

Objective 1: Establish Data Standards and Governance

Collaborate with Social Care Wales and other relevant partners to enable secure, standardised data sharing to support integrated care through practical use cases, gap analysis, and guidance aligned to national standards and future-state service models (Delivered by Connecting Care Big Change pillar 1).

Objective 2: Map Data Flows and Insights

Conduct a discovery exercise to map what data is collected, who reports it, what is reported, to whom, and why in specific identified areas. Use these insights to identify gaps, inform lobbying efforts, and link to the priorities identified in Big Change Pillar 1.
Explore AI solutions to automate routine tasks, enhance service delivery, and support data-driven decision-making in integrated care.

Objective 3: Build Reliable Data Foundations

Work with delivery organisations to ensure that data is clean, consistent, and reflects actual service delivery. Use this to support smarter planning and accountability.

Objective 4: Prepare Data for Integrated Care Records

Work with commercial experts to prepare data for integration into the care record system, ensuring readiness for future digital transformation and improved information sharing.

Objective 5: Review of consolidated data views for safeguarding

Within the Connecting Care programme quantify and communicate the financial and operational savings achieved through MAST and other single view solutions, including reduced referrals, improved triage, and targeted interventions.
Identify opportunities to take learnings and insights from the research elements of these projects.
Using insights from the comparison and research, explore funding opportunities for a national or regional rollout.