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A Healthier Wales – one year on

This week marks the one year anniversary of the Welsh Government plan for Health and Social care - ‘A Healthier Wales’.  

Since then HEIW has started to work towards delivering some of the actions that will transform Health and Social care within Wales.  Helen Thomas, Assistant Director of Leadership & Succession told us about some of the work underway to inform the leadership strategy.

“We have engaged with health and social care organisations to explore the leadership development opportunities currently provided across the sectors. This has illustrated many instances of best practice that can be widely shared, whilst providing key information to inform the development of the strategy.”

“Other good practice includes the Swansea University ‘Student Leadership Academy’, established to develop the leadership capacity of our future health and social care workforce. HEIW, along with Welsh Government has been invited to join the steering group to ensure alignment of the undergraduate leadership curriculum with the health and social care leadership strategy, as well as provide coaching and mentoring to academy students.

“Over the summer months, HEIW in partnership with Social Care Wales and Academi Wales will be working collaboratively to develop the health and social care Wales leadership strategy.”

‘A Healthier Wales’ recognises that a key factor in delivering high quality health and social care is the wellbeing and engagement of staff.  Claire Smith, Workforce Programme Manager coordinates our health and wellbeing network and is also the Chair of the NHS Wales Health and Wellbeing Network.  She told us what HEIW are currently working on.

“We are undertaking a review of workforce health and wellbeing, using results from a health needs assessment and our staff survey, to develop a health and wellbeing framework and action plan.  This will contribute to creating a working environment that leads to positive staff health and wellbeing.

“We are also working towards the Corporate Health Standard, a Healthy Working Wales recognised framework that promotes improvement of health and wellbeing of employees.”

NHS Wales Health and Wellbeing Network are hosting a ’Compassion Starts with Me’ conference open to all NHS staff later this year, full details here or view more about the work they are doing here.

Other initiatives that support colleagues include:

  • We have developed a Mental Toughness Guide that gives tips on how manage stress and support each other. 
  • We will be signing up to the Time to Change pledge to demonstrate our commitment to change how we all think and act about mental health in the workplace. 
  • We will be working with the Alzheimer’s Society Cymru to support the development of more Dementia Friends in the workplace including the creation of more accessible pharmacies in partnership with the Welsh Pharmaceutical Committee.