What is WCCIS? The Welsh Community Care Information System was the national programme to give community health and social care services in Wales a shared care record and case-management system. Over £42M and eleven years, it reached nineteen of twenty-nine target organisations, was declared "live", and was then rebranded "Connecting Care" rather than completed. Two local authorities are now actively seeking to exit, on the Auditor General's own account.
What WCCIS was for
One system for community health and social care across Wales: district nursing, mental health teams, therapies, and the case-management work of 22 local authorities, sharing a single record so that a person’s care did not fragment at the boundary between the NHS and the council. The need was real. It still is.
What was delivered
Over £42M and eleven years, the system reached nineteen of twenty-nine target organisations. It was declared “live”, and then — as deployment stalled — rebranded “Connecting Care” rather than completed. A year after the rename, its own programme director told the board it had been run “without any funding… a huge ask to do what we had to do over the last year.” Two local authorities are now actively seeking to exit, on the Auditor General’s own account.
The structural reading
One national system was asked to serve health boards and 22 local authorities with different statutory duties, different case-management models, and different funding — a single platform where the architecture needed building blocks. When it stalled, the programme escaped scrutiny by renaming instead of finishing: the pattern this site documents as the rebranding escape, inside the larger drift to low performance.
The successor approach
Not “WCCIS 2”. The Care chapter of the blueprint replaces the single platform with building blocks: a shared care-coordination record standard; an event stream (admission, discharge, package-of-care start and change) on the national backbone; and locally procured case-management systems that conform to both. Councils choose their tools; the data flows anyway.
The post-mortem it never had
The genuine, externally facilitated post-mortem of WCCIS is a named deliverable of Portfolio Ruthlessness — not to allocate blame, but because Wales is about to buy community-care systems again, and the £42M lesson is only expensive if it goes unread.Sources for this page