Our Solution
Criticism without alternatives is complaint. This is our detailed plan — governance reform, leadership standards, programme delivery, culture change, and independent benchmarking. Every proposal names an organisation that has already done it.
Criticism without constructive alternatives is mere complaint. We have documented the failures of DHCW in exhaustive, evidence-based detail — but we believe the people of Wales deserve more than a catalogue of what went wrong. They deserve a credible plan for how to make it right.
This reform blueprint is that plan.
We have studied what works. NHS England's Government Digital Service (GDS) and Transformation Directorate have built digital services that pass rigorous, independent assessment. Scotland's National Digital Platform delivers shared components that clinicians actually use. Denmark's sundhed.dk portal provides citizens with unified access to their health records. Estonia's X-Road creates secure data exchange across an entire national infrastructure. These are not theoretical models. They are working systems, in production, serving real populations.
We have mapped DHCW's failures against these comparators and asked a simple question: what would a competent, transparent, accountable digital health organisation look like in Wales?
Every recommendation is specific, implementable, and benchmarked against organisations that actually deliver. Every proposal comes with a concrete mechanism, a named comparator, and a measurable outcome.
These are not aspirational slogans. They are the minimum standards that any organisation spending hundreds of millions of public money on critical healthcare infrastructure should meet.
Wales deserves better than the status quo. Here is how to get there.
Governance Reform
End the era of self-oversight. Establish independent technical scrutiny, require genuine digital expertise on the board, and make transparency the default — not the exception.
Leadership and Talent
Replace failed leadership through open international search, verify credentials independently, pay competitively, and create career paths that retain the best technical talent.
Programme Delivery Reform
Adopt proven service standards, kill programmes that cannot deliver, enforce sunlight rules on stalled projects, reform procurement, and measure whether the public actually gets value for money.
Technical Strategy
Build systems that talk to each other instead of trapping data in silos. Adopt open standards, shared platforms, API-first architecture, and a credible plan to replace failing legacy systems.
Culture Reform
Protect people who speak up instead of punishing them. Measure psychological safety, introduce blameless post-mortems, and give staff a voice that cannot be silenced by the people it criticises.
Benchmarking and Accountability
Compare DHCW's performance against England, Scotland, and Denmark — and publish the results. Introduce personal accountability for directors and give the Senedd the tools to scrutinise digital health properly.
Implementation Roadmap
What needs to happen in the first 90 days, the first year, and across five years — a concrete timeline for transforming DHCW into a digital health service Wales can actually trust.