Llais responds to the Welsh Government’s Programme for Government

Across Wales, people tell us that they judge services not by structures, strategies or organisational boundaries, but by whether they can get help when they need it, whether they understand what is happening, whether services work together around them, and whether they are treated with dignity and respect.

The Programme places considerable emphasis on person-centred care, people’s experiences, lived experience, rights and reducing variation. It also commits to using evidence, data and patient experience to shape and improve services.

The challenge now is to ensure that those commitments are reflected not only in policy and service design, but in the way success is understood, measured and reported.

People’s experiences should not be treated as supplementary evidence. They should sit alongside performance, quality, safety, workforce and financial measures when assessing whether change is working.

We all experience health and social care as a whole so understanding whether system-wide change is succeeding requires more than measuring activity, delivery milestones or changes to structures. It also means understanding whether people can access services more easily, receive clear and timely communication, experience better continuity, feel involved in decisions, and see services responding to what matters to them.

We are asking Welsh Government to make this explicit in how progress against the Programme for Government is measured and reported. People’s experience should be visible alongside activity, performance and waiting-time information, and Government should set out how it will know whether integration is being experienced by people, not simply implemented through structures and processes.

Seamless health and social care

The Programme recognises that improvements in health cannot be separated from the sustainability and accessibility of social care, and that the long-standing division between health and social care does not reflect people’s real needs. It commits to more seamless transitions and more consistent standards.

People continue to tell Llais about difficulties at the boundaries between services, particularly around access, hospital discharge, continuity of care, unpaid caring, community support, navigating complex systems and understanding rights and entitlements.

As the Programme moves into delivery, it will be important that integration is judged not simply by new structures or processes, but by whether people genuinely experience services working together around them.

Over the last year, thousands of people across Wales helped shape Llais’ People’s Principles. They describe what good health and social care should look and feel like from the perspective of the people who use services.

People told us they want services that are accessible and timely, communicate clearly, treat them with dignity and respect, work together, see the whole person, are fair and inclusive, and support independence.

The People’s Principles provide a practical framework for understanding whether policies, strategies and reforms are making a meaningful difference to people’s lives. Llais will continue to use them to help interpret what we hear from people and communities across Wales.

We are also asking Welsh Government, health boards, local authorities and social care providers to use the People’s Principles in how they plan, deliver and assess services. Using them consistently would provide a shared, practical test of whether change is translating into the experiences people have told us matter.

We want to see the Principles reflected in the development of national performance and outcomes arrangements for health and social care, complementing existing patient and people’s experience measures and helping give people’s experience greater coherence and prominence across the system.

Connecting commitments with experiences

Llais will play its part by reporting independently and regularly on what people tell us, including where change is being felt and where it is not. Over time, we will continue to gather independent evidence from people and communities across Wales to understand whether improvements are being experienced, where experiences differ, whether inequalities are narrowing and whether people’s voices are influencing change.

The Programme for Government sets out what Government intends to do. The People’s Principles set out what people expect to experience. Over the coming years, Llais will continue to help bridge the gap between the two.

That is the role Llais will continue to play: listening independently, sharing what people tell us, highlighting where experience does not match ambition, and helping ensure that people’s voices shape decisions, improvement and accountability.