The health and social care sector in Wales is facing complex challenges, including workforce pressures, hospitals reaching capacity, and increased long-term health issues and inequalities. It is within this complex landscape that the Welsh Government has announced its ambition to establish an Integrated Community Care System (ICCS), providing Regional Partnership Boards (RPBs) with a comprehensive blueprint for transforming how health and social care services are delivered across Wales.
The ICCS represents a fundamental shift toward integrated and preventative care approaches. Integrated care intends to create a seamless pathway between health and social services, enabling better co-ordination and support to deliver person-centred care. Preventative care aims to identify and address health issues at their earliest stages, often delivered within a person’s home or community, before they develop into complex issues that require hospital-based care.
Despite a clear legal and policy framework to deliver preventative and integrated health and social care in Wales, set out in the ICCS blueprint, the Social Service and Wellbeing (Wales) Act 2014, and the Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, measuring the impact of preventative and integrated approaches remains challenging due to a lack of robust measurement tools and frameworks.
To address this, the Welsh Government has asked the Wales Centre for Public Policy to provide evidence on the extent to which existing measurement tools and frameworks can effectively evaluate the impact of integrated prevention and early intervention services, to support existing work to implement an ICCS across Wales.
We have commissioned the Centre for Health Promotion Research at Leeds Beckett University to carry out a rapid evidence review and group interviews with policy makers and practitioners involved in efforts to measure the impact of integrated prevention and early intervention in the UK and internationally. This research will respond to the following research questions:
- How have measurement tools for assessing the impact of integrated prevention and early intervention strategies in health and social care services been developed elsewhere?
- How are measurement tools and frameworks being used in the UK and internationally to evaluate the impact of prevention and early intervention in integrated health and social care? Which of these show promise in supporting an integrated approach to measuring the impact of prevention and early intervention in health and social care?
- How could existing evaluation tools, methods and approaches support the development of shared measurement frameworks for integrated prevention and early intervention in health and social care in Wales?
This work will inform the development of a shared measurement framework for the ICCS, which will support RPBs to measure and evaluate their efforts to deliver integrated and preventative community-based care and support.