As we complete our third successful year as a Special Health Authority, Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW) continues to grow and develop its digital leadership role.

Despite significant pressures across NHS Wales for both staff and patients, our committed workforce of more than 1,200 people have worked together to deliver some of the UK’s biggest digital and data healthcare projects, while supporting more than 100 high quality and secure health and care services for our partners.

We continue to listen to our staff, stakeholders and partners to evolve the way that we operate and provide the digital solutions our users need. We have made significant progress in developing strategic partnerships within NHS Wales and key commercial organisations, while empowering and supporting our staff.

In March, we published our long-term strategy outlining our transformational role in the delivery of health and care services over the next six years. The strategy builds on the five missions in our three year Integrated Medium-Term Plan (IMTP) and presents a bold, ambitious view of where we need to get to. Our updated purpose 'To make digital a force for good in health and care', underlines the value and benefits our work will deliver to healthcare professionals, patients and the public.

The NHS Wales App now deployed to all 373 GP practices in Wales, achieved over 170,000 user downloads by March 2024. As we continue to develop its features, the App will be pivotal in transforming health and care delivery in Wales. The App will empower people to take a more active role in managing their own health and wellbeing, with features such as appointment scheduling, test result access, ordering repeat prescriptions and choosing the pharmacy they want their prescriptions to be sent to.

In November, the Electronic Prescription Service (EPS) delivered the first electronic transfer of a prescription between a GP practice and community pharmacy in Wales. Delivery of this service is set to accelerate in 2024/25 and the EPS will make the process of prescribing and dispensing medicines easier, safer and more efficient for patients and healthcare professionals.

Progress has been made this year in enhancing cancer care through the Welsh Clinical Portal (WCP), which shares, delivers and displays patient information from multiple sources with a single log-on across health board boundaries. WCP has also improved the information quality and speed of delivering radiology and cardiology requests.

The Welsh Nursing Care Record (WNCR), now in its fourth year, is transforming the way nurses record, store and access patient information by replacing adult inpatient nursing notes with a secure digital system. The WNCR is now available in 85% of adult inpatient wards with nearly 13 million inpatient nursing notes captured.

Over 12,000 users in primary care have benefited from an expanding range of digital tools, including Choose Pharmacy, which supports community pharmacies in providing patient services, freeing up GP appointments for people with more complex needs.

We supported 14,000 vaccinators across NHS Wales to deliver the 10 millionth COVID vaccination and developed a new Primary Care Strategy to support the delivery of digital transformation across primary care services in Wales.

We have made significant strides in advancing the key platforms and infrastructure that are essential for modern healthcare delivery. Completing the build of the Google Cloud Platform has laid the groundwork for further development of the National Data Resource. We have migrated one of our data centres to a new location, supporting our Decarbonisation Strategic Plan, providing the next step to our cloud-first approach and ensuring stable and resilient systems.

We are proud of the early progress we are making in our approach to user-centred design, working collaboratively with partners to develop services to best meet their needs, and being awarded Digital Inclusion Charter Accreditation by Digital Communities Wales, which recognised our approach as ‘exemplary’.

DHCW aims to be a great place to work and substantial progress has been made in leadership and talent development, recruitment pipelines, equality and diversity, and strategic workforce planning. We are proud that our staff feel positive about working for DHCW, with this year’s staff survey telling us that 80% of staff rate DHCW as an ‘excellent or very good place to work,’ and 88% feel motivated to work for DHCW.

This is just a snapshot of the last 12 months, with more details of our successes and challenges within this report.

We look forward to continuing our progress in the coming year, collaborating closely with stakeholders and partners to make digital a force for good in health and care.