Welsh Government policies and strategies have consistently reflected the importance of citizens being appropriately cared for in their homes and in community settings. Consequently, there have been increasing efforts by Health Boards and Local Authorities within Wales to deliver more integrated care, to ensure that services and support for individuals, families and communities are effectively planned, co-ordinated and delivered. However one of the common and key impediments to integrated working between Health and Social Care services has been the inability of services to share information effectively.

Contributory factors to this problem have been the inconsistent and often limited investment in ICT systems to support Community Health services in Health Boards and the localised implementations of social care systems used by local authorities in Wales. Over 30 different instances of IT solutions are used across Wales social services, therapy and mental health systems with limited availability of systems to support community nursing. The WCCIS has been specified to ensure that its functionality overcomes such long standing issues.

Procurement
In December 2012 it was agreed that a Joint Procurement should be undertaken for a “Community Care Information System” to meet the requirements of both Community Health (including Therapies and Mental Health) and Social Care services. Practitioners from Health and Social Care jointly specified and selected a system, with more than 70% of functionality common across these services. As well as allowing the sharing of information across care services in the Community, the WCCIS will enable effective joint case management and workflow management across organisational boundaries.

Recognising the potential for the procurement to deliver a national solution for Wales, each Local Authority and Health Board were named on the OJEU Notice enabling these organisations to work together to deliver a range of benefits that would be derived from a joint implementation.

A single IT system will assist with data capture not only to support front line delivery of care, but to support demand and capacity planning, redesign of services and derivation of outcome and key performance indicators.

The WCCIS programme must ensure that this significant investment in ICT is not managed simply as a technology deployment programme. The implementation of WCCIS must recognise and support this unique joint venture as an essential enabler for transformational business change to better support delivery of integrated health and social care services for the benefit of these care providers as well as the citizen of Wales.