Our approach to the Well-Being of Future Generations Act

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1 Our approach to the Well-Being of Future Generations Act Well-Being Statement In April 2016, the Well-Being of Future Generations (Wales) Act came into effect. We see the Act as an opportunity to ensure our services are not only fit for the future but that everything we do is framed (without impacting current services) for the long term, considering prevention, integration, collaboration and involvement. Below, we have taken the opportunity to publish the Trust s well-being objectives. Our objectives have been developed in accordance with the sustainable development principle defined in the Act and are intended to demonstrate how we will contribute to the realisation of the shared well-being goals.

2 In a time of economic austerity and other constraints, the Act has provided us with an opportunity to take stock and to consider what we can do to help make Wales a better place in which to live in the decades to come. We believe that the objectives that we have set will challenge us, individually and as an organisation, to think differently, to develop novel ways of working and, simply, to do more. The Act should promote tangible change in how we, and other public bodies across Wales, operate. We are a provider of key, specialist health care services. Fulfilling this crucial role has always been our principle focus, but we already do so much more. As the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for Wales has remarked in his annual report for , Rebalancing healthcare, the NHS in Wales has a far broader role than the delivery of healthcare services. We recognize that we are a major employer and we care about the well-being of our colleagues and their families. We care about the communities in which we live and work and the impact that we have on our environment. The Act and our own objectives give us licence to challenge the status quo and to challenge ourselves, as never before, to think differently about what we do and the potential consequences of our activities for future generations.

3 Our Well-Being objectives 1. Reduce health inequalities, make it easier to access the best possible healthcare when it is needed and help prevent ill health by collaborating with the people of Wales in novel ways 2. Improve the health and well-being of families across Wales by striving to care for the needs of the whole person 3. Create new, highly skilled jobs and attract investment by increasing our focus on research, innovation and new models of delivery 4. Deliver bold solutions to the environmental challenges posed by our activities 5. Bring communities and generations together through involvement in the planning and delivery of our services 6. Demonstrate respect for the diverse cultural heritage of modern Wales 7. Strengthen the international reputation of the Trust as a centre of excellence for teaching, research and technical innovation whilst also making a lasting contribution to global well-being

4 How our objectives were developed We strive to do more than just treat disease. Our desire to constantly improve the quality of the care that we provide and to increase the scope of that care is fundamental to what we do. This concern has also been an important motivating factor in the development of our wellbeing objectives. We also wanted to use the process of developing our objectives as an opportunity to address our wider role in society. We aspire to deliver holistic care to our patients and donors, but we want to do more to support families and wider communities. This ambition is in line with the sustainable delivery principle. We considered that an important step in our development process was to identify the extent to which the sustainability principle was, in reality, already a key impetus for us, whether or not we would actually describe such motivating factors in the same terms as the Act now does. Recognising the extent to which we already work in a sustainable way helped us arrive at a new appreciation of the potential power of our individual and collective actions if they could be directed in a clear, concerted manner. The new way of thinking that the Act promotes will help us channel our efforts to maximum effect, but the realisation that sustainability is not an alien concept has been and will continue to be useful in communicating and embedding the new ways of working across the Trust. Health WBS Anaemia Management Caring for Carers, Patient Knows Best & Every Contact Counts Environment Obtain BREEAM sustainability rating of Outstanding for all future building developments Positive impact of better transport planning Wales and the World Collaboration overseas - work in Ghana, Peru, Uganda and elsewhere Palliative care course in collaboration with Cardiff University

5 Our determination to do more to support the health of our patients, our donors, their families and their communities illustrates the contribution we already make and will continue to make to the achievement of several of the well-being goals. By treating ill health, we help people to remain in, and return to, employment. This is fundamental to the well-being of our population, as illustrated by the Chief Medical Officer s recent report, and also directly supports the realisation of a prosperous Wales. Allowing people to continue contributing in a positive manner to society will support the vision of a Wales of cohesive communities. Our efforts to support the children of families affected by cancer, provides just one example of our concern for the long term health and well-being of the people of Wales. The Rebalancing healthcare report references an extensive evidence base that points to the potential harm that adverse childhood experiences can cause to both individuals and the wider community in the long-term. This, in part, motivated colleagues at the Velindre Cancer Centre to produce the children s book, Caring for my Family with Cancer. We intend to produce more in this series, to translate the books into other languages and to release an audio book. We are confident that the series will prove to be a valuable resource in promoting the well-being of young people dealing with often traumatic events. This work lends weight to our efforts to create a healthier Wales, but we hope that it will have longer-term benefits, contributing towards a resilient Wales and a Wales of cohesive communities. We are a major employer. The well-being of our staff and their families is important to us. We want to create more highly skilled jobs across our organisation. Our renewed attention on research, development and innovation can be a focus for improved collaboration with other health care providers and educational institutions. We intend to develop a Centre for Learning on the site of our new cancer centre and we will also host Health Technology Wales. Our approach should attract investment and serve as a catalyst for job creation which will also help the effort to create a prosperous Wales. It is our intention that this work will directly benefit the health of future generations in Wales and beyond. The achievement of our ambition to be acknowledged internationally as a centre for research excellence will help boost the nation s reputation and is absolutely in line with the vision of a globally responsible Wales. The Welsh Blood Service already has extensive international links and colleagues from Velindre Cancer Centre have conducted health needs assessment work in Uganda in collaboration with Public Health Wales. This work has provided valuable learning that, in turn, has benefited not

6 only the people of Uganda, but our own population and serves to illustrate the value of cooperation. We are acutely aware of the positive impact that we can have on our environment. Currently, we operate an extensive estate and we have ambitious plans to build a new cancer centre. This is a large scale investment with long term implications for our patients, our staff and the communities in which we work. We intend to pursue this development in an environmentally sensitive manner, adhering to the strictest environmental guidelines and employing innovative construction techniques. We also want to involve the local community in the development process. What next? Over the course of the next year, we will work to raise awareness of the well-being goals, our own well-being objectives and to embed the principle of sustainable development. Legislation is an important lever for effecting change, but making the well-being goals reality will take more. We will encourage behavioural and cultural change. In everything that we do, in the case of every relationship, we want to ensure that a sustainable approach is our default position. We are determined to make sustainability the norm. The Act is groundbreaking and it is helping to create an exciting new public service environment in Wales. As we embark on our journey, we expect to make false steps, to take wrong turns, but the safeguarding of our future is just too important an issue for us not to be ambitious in promoting the well-being agenda. Our intention is to focus our initial efforts on a set of the goals that relate to areas in which we can have an immediate impact. The ambitious scope of our objectives and the imperative to think in a genuinely long-term manner, inevitably means that these objectives will evolve over time. We are determined to develop new partnerships and it is likely that our own perception of what we can do to improve well-being in Wales will change as a result of these new relationships. As an organisation, we continue to actively contribute to the formation of a new national sustainability network which is developing out of the existing Sustainable Development Coordinators Cymru peer resource for local authorities and national parks. This and other fora have served as useful spaces in which we have been able to initiate positive conversations on collaboration and partnership working with other public sector bodies, particularly those from outside the healthcare ambit.

7 We have already begun to explore the possibilities for collaboration with other public sector bodies in Wales. Positive initial discussions have been held with Cwm Taf University Health Board with a view to cooperating on the development of a health promotion agenda. We have also opened discussions with Public Health Wales. In addition to the novel schemes to be delivered in conjunction with other healthcare organisations which are beginning to take shape, we are excited by the potential that the Act offers for partnership with bodies operating in other fields. We have had positive conversations with the Pobl group, a major provider of housing, care and support services across south Wales, about possible co-operation. We have also begun to take forward work with the National Museum of Wales. With the Museum, we hope to share learning on volunteering and to explore possibilities for advancing work in social prescribing. Our intention is that this activity will have the effect of helping to reduce the dependence of the population on services provided by NHS Wales by promoting well-being in ways that we haven t previously attempted, with partners that we may not have considered working with previously. This is in keeping with the Chief Medical Officer s call for a greater emphasis on public, community and individual involvement in the maintenance of good health outlined Rebalancing healthcare. Our ambition has been informed by the Act and we are confident that our work in these areas will contribute towards the realisation of the well-being goals. Measuring our progress We believe that it is important to acknowledge that our objectives represent only a first attempt to define how we will support efforts made across the public sector to realise the vision described by the well-being goals. This is a reality about which we want to be totally transparent. We recognise that measuring progress against our objectives may present some challenges in the short term. The work to realise the well-being goals set out in the Act will likely take place over decades. The impact of some of our sustainable activity, particularly with a longer-term scope, may be difficult to interpret. We are, however, intent on developing a robust sustainability component that will integrate meaningfully with our existing performance management framework. This will help us understand our working environment, the possible effects of proposed actions and will offer our stakeholders an acceptable level of transparency.

8 In measuring progress against our objectives we will, where appropriate, adopt indicators that we already collect. Elsewhere, we will consider how best to appraise our progress and will develop new measures where possible. Matrices and tools have been developed by organisations concerned with sustainable development in the UK and elsewhere which aid reporting on sustainability focused performance. The adoption of existing tools or the development of our own are approaches that we intend to explore, most likely in partnership with other bodies. In the short term, we intend to identify a number of new projects and areas of work in the coming year that we will be able to develop as case-studies which can be used to illustrate and interrogate progress against our well-being objectives.