<p>NHS Wales Informatics Service</p>

Part of 2. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 2:47 pm on 4 October 2017.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 2:47, 4 October 2017

Well, that’s more about the capacity of NWIS to actually undertake a joint mission, a different mission, of both developing new products and at the same time maintaining the significant architecture that we have. And we saw in the recent cyber attacks the ability of NWIS as a national body to co-ordinate action to maintain our whole system. That was a significant undertaking. I’ve said before in this Chamber, actually, that I do recognise the challenge in the real capacity for NWIS to continue to develop new products, to actually meet the public expectation about how they live their lives in the here and now, the expectation to be able to move data and information to share that in a way that actually matters to them. That’s why NWIS have actually helped us, for example, in creating the community pharmacy system, so that we’re now able to have a shared version of the GP record. There’s lots of health gain to be made in having the safe and effective transfer and sharing of records. I, again, have an open mind about whether we need to actually try and bring more people into NWIS to improve and increase their capacity or whether, actually, we need a different relationship with other people who develop products themselves. There’s a challenge there about intellectual property. There’s also a challenge about the ability for the public purse at a time of increasing austerity to be able to do that. This is the only part of the public service where there’s a continual expectation that we can spend more money and employ more staff. We have to be able to measure our expectations against the priorities we have in the whole service, but NWIS and information technology are absolutely a part of our architecture moving forward and are a significant part of the health gains still to be made. So, this is a priority issue for me, moving forward.