The Cabinet Minister for Health and Care has told the Senedd that a 10-year programme for digitisation of NHS Wales will be announced before the end of term, built on a refreshed digital and data strategy and "a road map of a single integrated patient record for Wales". This page sets out the six tests that will decide whether the programme transforms delivery or restarts a familiar cycle — published before the announcement, so the benchmark is on the record first. It will track the programme from announcement onward.
What has been announced
On 17 June 2026 the Cabinet Minister for Health and Care told the Senedd that the new Welsh Government has “used the first 100 days… to reset the approach to digitisation”, is developing “a digital and data strategy fit for the future, including a road map of a single integrated patient record for Wales”, and will announce “a future 10-year programme for digitisation… before the end of the term”. In parallel, the 100-day plan commits to an independent review of NHS performance and a joint review of the escalation and intervention arrangements under which DHCW sits at Level 4.
The ambition is right. Ten-year horizons are what digital infrastructure needs, and “we can’t continue with a fragmented and disjointed system” — the Minister’s words — is this site’s diagnosis in one sentence. Wales has been here before, though: the electronic patient record has been national policy since the Informing Healthcare strategy of 2003. What separates a transformation from a restart is structure, not ambition. Six tests will tell.
The six tests
1. “Single integrated patient record” means a federated record, not a single platform. One record assembled at query time from the systems that hold the data — the model Denmark and Estonia run today, specified for Wales in the target architecture. The other reading — one national system holding everything, built by one body — is the antipattern every comparator examined and rejected, and how NPfIT spent £10 billion at English scale. This is the programme’s single most consequential sentence; everything else follows from it.
2. Standards are separated from delivery. A small national body sets and certifies the standards; health boards procure clinical applications within them. If the body that writes the standards also builds the applications, the programme rebuilds the monopoly that produced the last five years. The operating model is worked out here.
3. Funding is released at assessment gates, not annual cycles. A 10-year programme funded year to year is a one-year programme ten times over — the annual trap is documented in DHCW’s own record. Gates with the genuine power to stop work are what make a delivery standard real.
4. Baselines and targets are published from day one. Burnout, sickness days, programmes on time, minutes published unedited, weekly active use of the NHS Wales App — today’s baselines are documented, and the monitoring framework sets out the scoreboard. A programme unwilling to publish its scoreboard has already reported its result.
5. The organisation question is answered, not deferred. The delivery body is at Level 4 targeted intervention. A credible programme says what it becomes — and what happens to its 1,263 staff, its £1.25B contract portfolio, and its live services. The worked answer and the transition plan exist.
6. Welsh Government’s own role is in scope. Annual funding cycles, remit-letter freezes and RAG-rating pressure co-authored the current position. A programme — or a review — that scopes out the funder will be absorbed exactly as its predecessors were.
What happens next
This page tracks the programme. When the announcement is made, it will be assessed here against the six tests, and each subsequent milestone will be logged in State of DHCW: Updates. The full blueprint the tests are drawn from — architecture, operating model, people plan, delivery standard, transition and route to adoption — is published, costed, and free to adopt under CC BY 4.0: the blueprint, chapter by chapter.