Secrecy
11 articles in this category.
The Organisation That Cannot Learn
Digital Health and Care Wales's data centre failed five years running — and each time, the failure vanished from the board minutes. How the record is edited, the assurance performed, and the escalation that only escalated reveal an organisation structurally unable to learn from its own failures.
“Deaths Will Continue to Occur”
“Deaths will continue to occur” — a coroner's 2023 warning to NHS Wales about mental-health records still kept on paper. Since 2018, coroners have named absent, delayed and partly delivered digital systems among the circumstances of deaths in 27 Prevention of Future Deaths reports — one warning that “the time it is taking is putting patients' lives at risk”, two of the newest addressed to the Chief Executive of Digital Health and Care Wales. This is the record of the coroners' courts.
The Safety Case DHCW Made Against Itself
The argument that NHS Wales's failing digital layer is a patient-safety problem is not the campaign's. It is written into Digital Health and Care Wales's own board minutes and into the Auditor General's reports: a cancer system run 'well beyond end of life', an intensive-care system paused on safety grounds, a 1,400-record identity incident reduced to a single clause, and a director warning that fragmentation builds 'patient safety risk into the system'.
The Digital Hype and Crash Wales
DHCW's directors saw the iceberg and held course. Across 37 board meetings and 2.6 million words of transcript, the board heard tens of warnings and admissions of failure from its own members — most of them deleted from the public record. Every programme that crashed had been flagged at the very first meeting.
Accountability as Alibi
Digital Health and Care Wales has not failed to build accountability structures. It has built accountability structures that function as their own alibi. A forensic walk through nine governance instruments — a £226M board approval in 25 minutes, an unfinished sentence in a 206-page annual report, a CEO update that omits ten months of intervention, three undeclared university titles — showing the form of accountability present everywhere and its substance absent everywhere, all measured against the very governance principles Andrew Goodall filed to the UK COVID-19 Inquiry under a Statement of Truth.
Delivery, Accountability and Leadership
Welsh Government has told Digital Health and Care Wales, formally and in writing, that it does not report risks honestly, that it cannot demonstrate value for money, and that its escalation framework is theatre. DHCW's response was to ask Microsoft Copilot to write its assurance commentary. The AI obliged.
How They Falsify the Public Record
85–90% of what was said at DHCW board meetings was deleted before publication. Warnings were erased. Financial figures were stripped. AI now drafts the sanitised record. The CEO's public updates omit the fact the organisation is under government intervention. The website that documented it was blocked on the NHS network. This is how NHS Wales controls what the public is allowed to know — and how CareNHS reconstructed the truth from 2.6 million words of verbatim transcript.
£757K to £49 Million. The Costs They Hide Keep Growing. Delivery Does Not
DHCW's published accounts show £757,000 in consultancy. A first FOI — after a complaint — revealed £8.94 million. Two further FOIs reveal £49 million in external contracts, including £20.6 million actually paid to a single supplier. Each time you ask, the number multiplies. And DHCW says even this answer is incomplete.
£207,100 to Hear the Truth — Then They Buried It
DHCW paid Atos £207,100 for an independent stakeholder review. 292 people responded. Only 13.3% spoke highly of the organisation. 43.2% found it challenging to work with. 50.4% said DHCW did not understand their work. The report was marked 'for external use.' It was never published. It was obtained only through FOI.
Six Freedom of Information Requests. One Identical Refusal
DHCW refused every FOI request this campaign has filed — not on substance, but on a technicality. They did not assess a single question. They did not disclose a single figure. They sent the same letter six times.
Try to Find Who Runs DHCW. You Can't
Directors with no public profile, a salary that ceased to appear in the accounts, and 23 off-payroll workers no one can name. The person responsible for programme delivery at an organisation under government intervention for programme delivery failures cannot be found by anyone outside the building.