Supporting national healthcare priorities

Our National Programmes function plays a vital role in aligning workforce and education requirements with national healthcare priorities. It ensures that NHS Wales has the skilled professionals needed to deliver high-quality, sustainable care.

Key programme achievements include:

Primary Care: The Strategic Workforce Plan for Primary Care supports sustainable workforce models. This improves recruitment, retention and training opportunities.

• 50% of foundation doctors now gain early experience in primary care. This supports integration across primary, community and secondary care, and improves GP specialty training fill rates.
• Optometry support staff have been given MECC Level 2 training, leading to increased patient referrals for smoking cessation and other preventative health interventions.
• Four cohorts of the Cluster Leadership Development Programme have been delivered, strengthening leadership and service sustainability in primary care clusters.

Planned Care: As part of the Cancer Nursing Workforce Transformation Project, delivered in collaboration with the Wales Cancer Network and funded by Macmillan, we are strengthening specialist services, improving workforce capacity, and ensuring high-quality patient care.

• Baseline analysis of the Cancer Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS) workforce completed, enabling workforce planning to support specialist cancer care.
• The Palliative and End-of-Life Care Competency Framework is being co-developed with key stakeholders to ensure high standards and equitable access to palliative care services.
• The Diagnostics Workforce Plan has launched a refreshed Healthcare Science Apprenticeship Framework. It’s also commissioned part-time practitioner training in audiology, clinical engineering and pathology to expand workforce capacity.

Urgent & Emergency Care: Collaboration on projects like the All-Wales Urgent Care Practitioner Competency Framework and Hospital Optimal Patient Flow Framework is proving beneficial. It’s improving patient flow, reducing delays and enhancing workforce capabilities across emergency settings.

• The Trusted Assessor toolkit has helped reduce delayed assessments from 1,000 to 700 days per month, supporting the Welsh Government’s 50-Day Integrated Care Winter Challenge.
• The ‘Press 0’ palliative care option on the 111 service is improving access to specialist palliative care advice.
• The Verification of Expected Death (VoED) online training package has been developed to upskill healthcare professionals in community settings. This helps reduce GP workload while enhancing service consistency.