Summary

Highlights for 2023-24

Gathering evidence and bringing people together to find solutions to complex problems, including: a RITA User Network to talk about using reminiscence technology for people living with dementia; ways to use co‑production and storytelling techniques to improve services and partnership working; and improving support for children and young people with neurodevelopmental conditions.

Improving access to evidence by providing insight into statistics and research for dozens of topics ranging from neurodiversity and dementia to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and virtual wards.

Getting work underway for the Digital, Data and Technology Board under the themes of getting the basics right, innovation, digital inclusion and integrated health and care records. This included identifying digital projects across the region and helped facilitate a successful SBRI bid for £200,000 to test a new, modernised home care delivery model in Torfaen, Gwynedd, and Denbighshire, underpinned by a purpose-built IT system.

Providing research support including case study hints and tips sessions and a consent and ethics framework for the Regional Integration Fund; designing a dashboard to measure regional progress against the Autism Code of Practice; and analysing hundreds of thoughtful responses to a Dementia Listening Campaign across six North Wales towns.

Working closely with the other regional hubs and national organisations, we shared, promoted, and developed new ideas, including as part of the North Wales Innovation Network. By the end of the year, we had increased our Twitter/X followers to 450 and now have over 200 subscribers to the RIC hub mailing list.

Please follow us on Twitter/X @_NW_RICH, sign up to our newsletter and visit the RIC hub webpages for more information.

The year in figures

Bringing people together to innovate

No one person has the answer to how we solve complex problems in health and social care. This year the Regional Innovation Coordination (RIC) hub has been experimenting with different ways of bringing people together to learn and find new ways of working. Building on our work with the Developing Evidence Enriched Practice (DEEP) project, Mike Corcoran from Coproduction Lab Wales has also been working with us as a facilitator to find creative solutions to getting the best out of our meetings.

Radical thinking with the Regional Partnership Board

We were asked to explore radical ideas that could help the Regional Partnership Board address challenges facing health and social care. After binging TED talks, inspirational books, and articles it became clear that the best place to start was by bringing people together.

The first workshop began with defining radical thinking – it’s about disruption, innovation, risk-taking, passion and impact. We talked about how being ‘radical’ should not be an end in itself as it can harm as well as benefit people. To mitigate, we came up with a set of guiding principles for how and where we could be purposefully radical for good. This includes gathering stories from those with lived experience to inform service design and delivery, convening conversations to connect all partners with a shared stake in collective challenges, exploring new ways to do more with available finances and resources, giving people permission to act, and sharing responsibility between members of the board.

Focus on children and young people

We’ve continued to support the Children’s Regional Partnership Board (RPB), by pulling together research, statistics and children and families’ stories in each of their priority areas. We also helped plan a co-production event for the board to help set their vision, mission, and priorities.

This year we published the findings of our focus on disability and illness and carried out a focus on neurodiversity (ND).

From being moved to moving – putting stories into action

We worked with the Developing Evidence Enriched Practice (DEEP) project to put together an event for the Regional Partnership Board in November 2023 to learn more about storytelling, and share their knowledge and experiences. The event was funded by Health and Care Research Wales and Welsh Government.

Many stories were shared during the day, demonstrating the value of stories in understanding the complexity of humans, and how powerful stories can be used to change mindsets, and motivate and inspire ourselves and others.

For more information see our storytelling event blog post.

Finding out what works

Evaluation

To help identify innovation with potential for scale and spread, the RIC hub has been supporting the evaluation of the £44 million North Wales Regional Integration Fund programme. We use a mix of numbers and story collection to make sure we don’t miss important changes just because they’re difficult to count. This year the focus has been designing the evaluation and supporting projects with improving the quality of information collected.

We facilitated the co-design and planning of an evaluation of the Emotional Health and Wellbeing Resilience Framework for 0- to 25-year-olds using Most Significant Change story selection panels.

We’re also part of 100 stories project steering group with Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board and Wrexham University, supporting recruitment of individuals with learning disabilities and neurodevelopmental conditions to co-produce the project to learn from young people and their family’s stories about transition from children’s to adult services.

Literature searches

Our specialist librarian carries out searches to find out what research has already been carried out on a topic or examples of best practice. During the year, we carried out 40 literature searches and produced 7 evidence summarise including early years, unaccompanied asylum seekers, AI ethics/guidance, AI for decision making, AI for monitoring, virtual wards, integrated care records, coproduction with children, prenatal interventions, interventions for children with complex needs, family breakdown (rates for parents of children with complex needs, support, and increased residential care), autism and ADHD (waiting lists, diagnosis, support, demographics, bullying, trauma, and school exclusions), neurodiversity definitions, innovative social care models, care home fee toolkits, and RPB outcomes frameworks.

Some of these were published as part of the focus on children and young people’s work.

If you work with the Regional Partnership Board on integrated health and social care projects in North Wales and would like to request a search, please contact our Specialist Librarian.

Our impact

We often work with projects in the early stages to help innovative ideas get started. This can involve making connections between different projects, carrying out some initial research to help understand a problem better or identify what’s working well in other areas. To find out more about the kind of impact this work has, we sent out a survey to a selection of people we supported with significant pieces of work to find out what has happened since. The response rate to such a survey was encouraging with in excess of 65% responding. A huge thank you to everyone who took the time to feedback to us. Chart 1 summarises the most common benefits emerging from our support including improving quality, saving time, and identifying and stimulating ideas or innovation. Over the next few pages we’ve included comments that illustrate the kind of impact our work has.

Here are a selection of quotes from the survey about the impact we’ve had this year.

Support with evaluation

“I have received valuable support and guidance from the RIC Hub during the set-up of the CAMHS Innovation programme, now that the program is up and running the Evaluation Officer provides expert support and guidance to the project teams to enable them to access and make good use of improvement tools”.

“The support given will enable me to evaluate the work that I undertake. This is essential as it will (hopefully) demonstrate the need and in turn the continuing funding. The reflection aspect will ensure that the is ongoing development with the ability to adapt to achieve the best possible outcome… The help given has ensured that I am capturing what is needed, saving time and providing a focus.”

Promoting innovative ideas

“Wrth hyrwyddo’r gwaith drwy’r cyfryngau cymdeithasol wedi’n galluogi i leadaenu newyddion am y gwaith arbennig sy’n cael ei wneud ar hyd y rhanbarth…Arwain y blaen wrth fynd a’n partneriaid ac aelodau wahanol fyrddau gyda ni ar daith yn dangos pa mor bwerus yw adrodd straeon wrth wneud penderfynniadau sy’n trawsnewid bywydau unigolion ar hyd Gogledd Cymru. [Promoting the work through social media has enabled us to spread news about the special work being done throughout the region. Leading the way by taking our partners and members of different boards with us on a journey showing how powerful storytelling is in making decisions that transform the lives of individuals throughout North Wales.]”

“Blog and PR work by the RICH help generate increased awareness of and access to services by people living with dementia and their carers and people living with autism and their carers.”

Improving communication and participation

“The qualitative methods and story writing has helped people living with dementia to tell their story with a written-out script, so they can use it as a prompt when delivering presentations.”

“Receiving the support of the RIC Hub… has had a significant impact on the documents produced, ensuring all documents were accessible. The final documents were also set out in an easy format to navigate and the overall appearance of the document were more inviting to the reader.”

Impact of data and statistics

“The information provided has helped us develop key strategic documents. Services will be planned to meet the needs of the population. For example, the information provided by the Population Needs Assessment can inform the proportionate distribution of funding across client types… Simply put, your reports provide very useful information for us. Thank you.”

“Data collation and dashboard creation by the RIC Hub for the dementia standards and the Autism Code of Practice have allowed us to establish a base line position, add data to build a fuller picture and monitor progress against the standards and codes across all partners and on a regional basis.”

‘Gwnewch y pethau bychain’: small-scale innovation

As a team with experience in research, innovation, and improvement, we’ve picked up some useful skills over the years and are often asked to help solve small‑scale problems that crop up in regional working. These won’t change the world by themselves, but they do help us work more efficiently so we can spend more time on the things that matter. These are all available as templates for other regions too.

Making the numbers count

We produce regular updates to the population needs assessment, which tells us about the number of people who need different kinds of care and support.

Updates published

• New area profiles for primary care clusters.
• Updated area profiles for unitary authority areas and local health areas.
• Statistics about the key indicators of mental health in children and young people in North Wales.
• Estimates of the prevalence of dementia in North Wales.
• Statistics about neurodevelopmental conditions in children and young people.
• Summaries of protected characteristics from the 2021 Census, to support equalities impact assessments and other evaluation work.

View the statistics and research pages on the regional collaboration website.

Innovation: Digital, data and technology

Our achievements this year through the North Wales Digital, Data and Technology Board.

Priority 1: Getting the basics right – seamless secure access to systems and information at any time from any place.

Priority 2: Innovation. Joined up approach to digital innovation. Maximising use of funds.

Priority 3: Digital Inclusion – Joined up approach to community connectivity, enablement and enrolment

Priority 4: Data and Integrated health and care records and referrals – a combined view of an individual’s record for health and care staff. Combined approach to data.

Overall

Digital Data and Technology is now being considered as part of the 10 Year Capital Plan to influence and direct the allocation of funding of the Health and Social Care Integration and Rebalancing Capital Fund.

Communication and engagement

Website

We continued to share information through our webpages including the collection of good ideas and engagement database. Highlights include:

• The Dementia Bus – a lightbulb moment for carers
• Robot cats and dogs for dementia;
• The dementia listening campaign
• Hepatitis C rapid test and treat project
• Annual health checks for people with learning disabilities
• New North Wales Dementia Friendly Communities Scheme

The North Wales Population Assessment and our team home page are still in the top 5 most visited pages on the regional collaboration website. The number of visitors to the Regional Innovation Coordination Hub home page increased by 11% to 760 this year.

Newsletters

We shared 10 newsletters during the year full of information about research, innovation, and improvement activities and another 35 people subscribed to our newsletter, taking the total to 205.

Twitter update

Over the year we gained another 50 followers on our Twitter/X accounts increasing the total to 450. The Twitter accounts have been used to share good ideas, ongoing projects, innovations from across the UK, relevant events, and live tweets from conferences. They have also been used to promote the support our team and other organisations can offer, to help with health and social care projects in North Wales.

What’s next

In 2024-24 we will

• Find out what’s working well: Carrying out evaluations and improving the way we collect data and stories about what’s changed. Finding ways to present information clearly to the Regional Partnership Board. Evaluations planned for this year include two innovative residential projects for young people at risk of care or custody due to their behaviours, Multi Systemic Therapy team in Flintshire and Wrexham and Bwthyn Y Ddol residential service in Denbighshire and Conwy. Plus, trialling ways to use stories to help us learn and improve the emotional health and wellbeing model of care.
• Roll out the best ways to support people with health and care needs. Work with other RIC hubs to identify and share good ideas across North Wales and other regions. Continue to experiment with innovative ways to bring people together to solve complex problems.
• Explore options for a digital innovation in social care conference to give social care workers and members of the public a chance to see what’s possible and try out the latest technologies.
• Provide data, insight and intelligence for the Regional Partnership Board and Children’s RPB including improving systems, Census 2021 analysis and regular topic reports.
• Improve access to evidence by promoting the support available from the Specialist Librarian to access evidence about what works in health and social care and working closely with Social Care Wales and Developing Evidence Enriched Practice (DEEP) programmes to support the use of evidence within social care.

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Contact us

Phone: 01824 712432

Email: nwrich@denbighshire.gov.uk

Twitter: @NW_RICH_ / @_NW_RICH