Summary

The hub provides health and social care research, innovation, and improvement support for the North Wales Regional Partnership Board.

Highlights for 2024-25

• Holding the first Welsh Digital Social Care Showcase on 5 March 2025, funded by external sponsorship. Tickets sold out within days of launching registration and initial feedback has been extremely positive about the impact made.
• Brought practitioners together to share ideas about how best to support people through Ripple Effect Mapping sessions. This is spread and scale at a local level, helping innovative ways of working to be adopted across the region. More robust evaluation helps identify what works here.
• The focus on neurodevelopment information pack we developed last year was used as a key part of the Welsh Government Accelerated Design Event. The pack pulls together a range of evidence about the experience of children, young people and families with neurodevelopmental conditions in North Wales.
• Facilitated procurement of a new social care system between North Wales and the Cwm Taf Cluster, which will put all six North Wales social care departments onto the same system for the first time, ready for future record integration.
• Improved dementia screening for people with Down’s Syndrome.
• Worked with the Children’s RPB to improve communication and collaboration and prepared and ran a development workshop on Early Years.
• Set up a searchable collection of health and social care research related to the RPB priority groups that was published by people working in North Wales.

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.

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

The year in figures

Ripple Effects Mapping (REM)

We facilitated 24 workshops with 15 different projects. The Regional Integration Fund (RIF) invested £3,176,196 this year into these projects so it’s important to understand the impact they have.

What is Ripple Effects Mapping?

Ripple Effects Mapping is an evaluation method that visually captures the impact of a project or service. Similar to how a stone creates ripples in water, the actions of individuals and services generate effects -both intended and unintended – within communities and within people’s lives. Ripple Effects Mapping provides a structured way to track these ripple effects. It is a participatory method and invites staff, partners and stakeholders to reflect and positively engage with the evaluation of their projects and services. It helps services to understand how their work influences individuals, communities, and other services. In the context of health and social care, it helps map the interconnected nature of various services, such as healthcare, social care, statutory services, and third-sector organisations. The method allows participants to reflect on successes and challenges.

Why we use Ripple Effects Mapping

We chose Ripple Effects Mapping because it is a good evaluation method for complex systems. It allows for a holistic understanding of impact and can be applied to virtually any project, giving staff, partners and stakeholders an opportunity to co-design and co-produce their maps. Additionally, it can be combined with case studies, stories, and other evaluation methods such as ‘Most Significant Change’ and ‘Magic/Tragic Moments’ to highlight real-world impacts on individuals and communities.

Next steps

We plan to refine our Ripple Effects Mapping sessions based on feedback. This includes:

• Enhancing facilitator training and training new facilitators to expand our capacity for running more sessions throughout the year.
• Integrating Ripple Effects Mapping into routine evaluation processes to ensure its benefits are sustained. This also supports consistent evaluation practices across multiple services.
• Encouraging broader stakeholder participation, including individuals with lived experiences, to create a richer and more comprehensive impact assessment.
• Creating a structured session schedule to engage more participants and stakeholders.
• Facilitating session to help teams bring together findings from multiple projects to analyse the results at a programme / regional level. This will help provide evidence for the RIF models of care.
• Publish a Ripple Effects Mapping User Handbook.
• Set up Ripple Effects Mapping Drop in’s / participant sessions.

By embedding Ripple Effects Mapping into our evaluation practices, we aim to continuously improve our services, ensuring they remain effective, reflective, and impactful for the people and communities we support.

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.

We also answer queries for people, so the nuances of government statistical definitions take down the very fewest of us and allow service deliverers to deliver their services with minimal data-inflicted injuries. Please contact us at nwrich@denbighshire.gov.uk if you need numbers to support integrated health and social care work in North Wales.

Updates published

• Key drivers of demand for children’s services bulletin.
• Demand for care home places in North Wales bulletin.
• Housing and homelessness research bulletin.
• Dementia strategy statistics update.
• Updated area profiles for primary care clusters, unitary authority areas and local health areas.
• Updated prevalence estimates for dementia and neuro developmental conditions based on latest mid-year population statistics.

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

Literature searches

Our specialist librarian carries out searches to find out what research has already been done on a topic or examples of best practice. During the year, we carried out 64 literature searches and produced 9 evidence summaries including information sharing protocols, five ways to well-being, working collaboratively, unpaid carers, responses to the Health and Social Care (Wales) Bill, bringing care closer to home, delayed discharge into social care, partnership working, parent and child perspectives on autism assessments, and AI guidance / ethics.

Evidence summaries published this year

• Bringing care closer to home.
• Neurodiversity assessment – the views of children and young people.
• AI in health and care.

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.

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.

This year we supported the work on communication and collaboration and prepared and ran a development workshop on Early Years.

For more information about the impact of last years’ focus on neurodevelopment work, please see the Ripple Effects Mapping section of the report.

‘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. Whenever possible, we can make these available as templates for other regions too.

• Created a dementia measurement dashboard.
• Developed Neurodiversity Improvement Programme Performance Measures Spreadsheet.
• Provided templates and advice for a regional mental health service mapping project and shared previous service mapping findings with the Well North Wales project.
• Shared the templates for engagement used in the Population Needs Assessment with a partner who used them as a basis for their engagement work.
• Shared processes and advised on development of the revised North Wales Learning Disability Strategy.
• Created a new process for generating content for the RPB website to share good practice, improved the site structure to make it easier for people to find the information they need and developed a style guide to improve consistency.

Digital, data and technology innovation

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

This work has been continuing but has been challenging. There’s more information in the what went wrong and what we learned section of this report.

Priority 2: Innovation.

North Wales Digital Social Care Showcase 2025

On 5 March 2025 we brought together digital technology providers with people who plan, use and provide social care for the first North Wales Digital Social Care Showcase. The event was funded by sponsorship from technology companies like Synanetics. It was a great success with spaces to connect and reflect about how we use digital technology and try things out for ourselves.

Workshops included:

• Tips for using everyday technologies to help you live the way you choose.
• How to co-design a bespoke care solution using everyday smart technologies.
• Mobile phone apps that you can use to help improve your health and well-being.
• How to help your organisation and your staff get ready for a digital future.
• A chance to see and try out medication management gadgets to support people to take their medication on time.

Around 190 people attended on the day, in addition to speakers, exhibitors and organisers. People told us their main highlights were networking, hearing from people with learning disabilities about their experiences, demos and user experience stories, the WLGA presentation, workshops and exhibitions. We have also started mapping the ripple effects from the event, which includes improved relationships between partners for facilitating digital innovation and support to take forward innovative ideas.

More information: Digital Showcase Website, video of the event, social media story.

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

The health board have continued their research programme into digital inclusion and exclusion and its impact on health and healthcare in North Wales.

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.

The main focus was on the Connecting Care (WCCIS programme). Market research found that there was no single system that would work for all the different departments in health and social care, so the decision was made to purchase the best system for each service area and then integrate them as the next phase in the project. This year we helped develop a business case and facilitated procurement of the new system, which will put all six North Wales social care departments onto the same system for the first time ready for future record integration. We learned a lot from this process which we’ve shared with colleagues involved in other procurement exercises. Working together has created a strong network and good working relationships which will support future learning and joint working. For example, sharing workshops and training across the region is saving us time and money.

Over the next 12 to 18 months, we’ll work across the region to set up the new system to meet both regional and local needs, move data from the old system to the new, and train staff in how to use it.

We host regular meetings with colleagues from Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board and the North Wales Local Authorities around the Connecting Care Programme. At these we’ve met with Digital Health and Care Wales to feed into their consultation about Integrated Care Records. We’ve also met with colleagues from Cardiff and Vale Regional Partnership Board to learn about their Digital Care Region Programme and approach to developing a Shared Care Record.

Pictures from our Digital Showcase

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 have been following up with people to find out what has happened since.

Here are some examples:

• Other teams have adopted Ripple Effect Mapping as a tool for evaluation and reflection after attending sessions with us. They said that as well as helping evaluate and report on the impact of their projects it’s helped them to ‘think outside the box’, consider ‘unexpected outcomes as well as the expected’ and ‘increased choices [for people who use the service] in what they do every day.’ One team said that it will help to support the case for new capital investments.
• Provided data to inform a sound evidence base for making decisions including help to provide affordable housing and prevent homelessness.
• Publishing the annual report led to someone getting in touch with us to see how we could work together on a research project to reduce the number of out of county placements for children and adults. As a result, we connected different projects to improve the way we work together. We also provided insight into research on the topic, which helped shape workshops and discussions with partners.
• The radical ideas workshop we created for the RPB has led to a new Terms of Reference including the importance of innovation.
• An article about our work supporting the Children’s RPB has been published as an example of good practice on Social Care Wales Project Finder.

These were the most common responses when asked what benefits people saw because of working with our team.

• Improved quality
• Saved time
• Identified / stimulated ideas or innovation
• Improved coordination
• Reduced duplication
• Saved money.

Doing with not for

Feedback: “The team have shown me how to do some jobs which has saved me a lot of time and also supported me with their expertise to make information clearer and easier to share with partners. The RIC team give an invaluable service.”

Doing things with people rather than for them has been a guiding principle this year. We were conscious that in our eagerness to get stuck into doing things we were missing opportunities for other teams to learn and develop as well as ending up with more work than we could manage. By training people to use techniques like Ripple Effect Mapping and story-telling approaches like Most Significant Change we’re able to have a much greater impact. The feedback we’ve had (including the quote above) is encouraging us to think we’re starting to get the balance right.

What we’ve learned

Inspired by the Human Learning Systems approach that ‘what works’ in complex systems is to keep experimenting and learning, here are some of things we’ve learned this year.

• Bringing people who support people together informally (Ripple Effect Mapping participant networking sessions) has supported a natural sharing of ideas about how best to support people. This is spread and scale at local level, which has the potential to impact the adoption of innovative projects across the region.
• About the challenges involved in procuring a large, complex IT system as part of the Connecting Care programme. We’ll work on a lessons learned report to help inform future programmes.
• How beneficial technology was for keeping people in touch with each other during lockdowns and how it can help give us more control over our own lives. But this needs balancing with concerns that when technology replaces people we can lose out on an opportunity for social connection. Digital showcase blog.
• Fetal alcohol conditions may affect up to 16% of people, although we need to take care that rising awareness of this leads to better approaches to support children and families rather than increased stigma.
• Understanding and articulating the value of some preventative services, including how they prevent people from experiencing crisis or escalating needs for support. More people (for example families awaiting CAMHS support, adults awaiting mental health support, unpaid carers) are waiting for or do not meet the criteria for health and care support and prevention and early intervention services are stepping in to support them.

What’s next

The Welsh Government RIC Hub programme is expected to change for 2025/26 to focus more on innovation at a national scale. While we wait for decisions about our involvement in that work, here are some of our plans with the Regional Partnership Board.

In 2024/25 we will support the Regional Partnership Board with:

• Research and innovation. Research to inform capital spending plans, which includes the land, buildings and equipment we need to improve health and social care services. Evaluation of the impact of grant schemes like the Regional Integration Fund. Deep dives into research priorities like domiciliary care and supporting children’s mental well-being. Data updates for the Population Needs Assessment including an unpaid carers bulletin. Improving access to evidence through literature searches.
• Communication and engagement. Website and social media updates. Collecting digital stories. Updating the engagement database to inform the population needs and well-being assessments. Children and young people’s participation mapping. Sharing Good News Stories from across the Regional Partnership Board.
• Digital, data and technology. Follow-up contacts and ideas from the Digital Social Care Showcase event on 5 March 2025. Continue supporting the Connecting Care Programme. Facilitate the North Wales Digital, Data and Technology Board meetings and support with work planning and activities.