Summary

The North Wales Regional Innovation Coordination Hub supports health and social care partners to test ideas, learn from practice and improve services across the region. During 2025/26, our work focused on strengthening evidence, spreading innovation, and supporting people to work differently in complex systems.

A core strand of our work this year was helping services understand their impact. We supported 24 Ripple Effects Mapping workshops and embedded storytelling approaches such as Most Significant Change across a wide range of projects funded through the Regional Integration Fund. This helped teams move beyond reporting against targets towards learning what is working, what is not, and why. Sharing these approaches at national events and regional learning exchanges has helped spread and scale methods that support reflection, improvement and person‑centred practice.

We continued to support innovation at scale, including early work on warmer homes and health, dementia screening for people with learning disabilities, and evaluation of innovative models supporting children and families. Our award‑winning dementia dashboard brought together data from across North Wales to give a clearer, shared picture of how people access the memory support pathway.

Our digital, data and technology work focused on getting the basics right as well as enabling bigger change. This included supporting the Connecting Care Programme, piloting regional SharePoint sites, contributing to national digital learning programmes and helping partners share learning through events and networks.

Alongside this, we produced research bulletins, evidence summaries and population insights to inform regional planning, including work towards the next Population Needs Assessment. We also prioritised communication and engagement, using blogs, newsletters, events and social media to share learning and amplify good practice.

Across all our work, we focused on collaboration, inclusion and learning. By combining data, evidence, stories and relationships, we continue to support partners across North Wales to improve services in ways that reflect what matters to people who use care and support services.

Please follow us on Bluesky @nwrich.bsky.social, Twitter/X @_NW_RICH, sign up to our newsletter and visit the RIC hub webpages for more information.

As an innovation hub we’ve been experimenting with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Most of this report was written by human beings with some AI help in summarising and phrasing. We’ve checked this for accuracy and take responsibility for the content. 

The year in figures

• 9 research bulletins
• 10 newsletters
• 12 evidence summaries
• 24 area profiles
• 24 Ripple Effect Mapping workshops
• 61 literature searches
• 132 posts on Bluesky
• 135 Tweets
• 250 newsletter subscribers
• 264 Bluesky followers
• 437 Twitter followers

Innovations working at scale

Warmer homes, easier breathing: support that finds the people who need it

Staying warm in winter can help us stay healthy, especially for people living with conditions like asthma and arthritis.

Two Regional Innovation Coordination (RIC) Hubs have been exploring how health data can help identify people who would benefit most from extra support. In Cwm Taf Morgannwg, the team helped residents apply for Pension Credit, giving them more money for essentials like heating. In Gwent, the focus was on improving home insulation. Both approaches led to fewer people needing hospital care for breathing difficulties over the winter.

Welsh Government now want to see similar approaches adopted across Wales through their new Innovations Working at Scale Programme. In North Wales, the RIC Hub has been meeting with people across health, housing and benefits teams to understand what’s already working in the region. And to explore how this kind of targeted support could make a difference for local residents.

The team are looking at linking data to see where targeted help would make the most difference for people.

If you’d like more information or to be involved in this project, please contact us at nwrich@denbighshire.gov.uk.

Iechyd a Mwy (Health+) innovation panel

We took part in the Iechyd a Mwy (Health+) innovation panel organised by MSparc and Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board on 29 May 2025. It was affectionately nicknamed ‘the board you can’t afford’ as it brought together a panel of experts who could provide advice on developing businesses, dealing with intellectual property rights, public sector procurement and more, to provide advice and guidance at no cost to the innovators. The panel reviewed 14 ideas and provided feedback and support.

The panel considered a wide range of strong submissions, and we want to extend our thanks to the people who put themselves forward to pitch their ideas to the panel. For future events, we would like to extend the time spent with those who would benefit most from the support. Other learning from the day was that ideas for new IT software in health and social care need linking up to national programmes and the existing market while being conscious not to stifle innovation. We also need better understanding of risks and benefits of AI to assess AI-based innovations.

Evaluating innovative approaches

We were asked by the Children’s Regional Partnership Board to evaluate a project designed to support children who are looked after by their local authority to return home to their families. They wanted to know whether the project was improving outcomes for children and young people, if it was cost effective and any recommendations for improvement. The final report is going through approval at the moment, so we’re not able to say much about the results at this stage. But we think this is an approach that we’ll be able to use next year to help the Children’s Regional Partnership Board make evidence-informed decisions about what projects to support and share learning across the region about innovative approaches.

Brighter days: award winning dementia dashboard

It’s not easy to work collaboratively across an area the size of North Wales. Dementia service planners challenged us to bring together data from across the regional memory support pathway. We needed to find a way to organise and present the data we collect from six local authorities, a health board split into three areas and four different third sector organisations. People affected by dementia receive different support at different times and from different organisations. Some councils provide support directly, some commission voluntary sector organisations to provide support on their behalf.

We needed a dashboard that pulled all this different data together to help plan services that support people living with dementia and their carers with the things that matter to them, wherever they live and throughout their journey.

We started work on this last year and produced a basic dashboard in Excel. It worked but it was static and clunky to update. We knew we needed help, so we applied to be part of the Digital Health and Care Wales’s Analytics Learning Programme. This programme gave us access to around eight days of training covering skills from curiosity and active listening to data visualisation and storytelling as well as technical skills in SQL, Python and PowerBI. But most importantly, the dementia dashboard was accepted as a topic for a collaborative learning project. This meant for five months over the summer we got to work with a superb group of data analysts from across Wales. They produced an interactive PowerBI dashboard with us which works much better than our old spreadsheet version.

The final result was so good that the team won the award for best overall project!

Phase two: improving dementia screening for people with learning disabilities

Last year we reported on our work to support a team of learning disability nurses in Denbighshire to develop an approach to screening people for dementia. The pilot went well, and for phase two we’re rolling out the process across North Wales. The main challenge was different councils using different versions of Microsoft Office and a spreadsheet that only worked on the more recent versions. That’s gradually been sorted as councils moved on to the latest software updates.

The feedback has been really positive – people found the spreadsheet easy to use and appreciated the way it flags up when people are due a screening. They’ve enjoyed meeting people to complete the cognitive well-being checks with them, and then being able to populate the spreadsheet to keep track of the data. The template will help local authorities identify people with Down’s syndrome who are developing dementia earlier so they can provide better support.

Spreading what works: evaluation to learn and improve

The Regional Integration Fund (RIF) invested around £3.2 million this year into these projects so it’s important to understand the impact they have. This year we facilitated 24 Ripple Effects Mapping workshops with 15 different projects.

Our evaluation informs the work on the Population Needs Assessment and regional planning.

What is Ripple Effects Mapping?

Ripple Effects Mapping is a participatory evaluation method that visually captures how projects and services create both intended and unintended impacts. Like ripples from a stone dropped in water, actions taken by individuals and services generate effects across people, communities and systems. Ripple Effects Mapping provides a structured way for staff, partners and stakeholders to reflect on successes and challenges, helping them understand how their work influences individuals, communities and interconnected health, social care and third‑sector services.

What is Most Significant Change?

The Most Significant Change approach involves generating and analysing personal accounts of change and deciding which is the most significant – and why. Most Significant Change is not just about collecting and reporting stories but about having processes to learn from them – in particular, to learn about the similarities and differences in what different groups and individuals value.

Learning from the evaluations

We have the privilege of working alongside people providing care and support to help them evaluate, learn and improve. Here are some of the things that struck us from evaluations during the year that we thought should be shared more widely.

• Increased understanding of children and families experiencing neurodivergence, their experiences in the health and social care system and the widespread ripple effects of emotional dysregulation on themselves, their families, staff in school and the community. This reinforces the need for a neurodivergence pathway starting in early years, increasing understanding and awareness of autism and neurodivergence to prevent escalation.
• The critical success factors involved in successfully embedding Positive Behaviour Support in a school setting were that the project was aligned with organisational values and the training included tasks to be applied at all levels in the school, which led to changed mindsets and further embedding.
• The timing of funding decisions means some interventions and new ways of working that have been effective are stopped, and even if funding becomes available cannot be reinstated easily due to loss of knowledge, skills and resource.

Ripples from our work – from proving to improving

To reflect on our own journey in supporting services to use Ripple Effects Mapping, we developed a Ripple Effects Map of our practice.

We found the factors critical to spreading the approach across North Wales were:

• Preparing the ground – building relationships and creating a shared understanding of services.
• People need safe and brave spaces to reflect and make sense of practice.
• It takes time for staff to be confident to change the way they report from ‘proving to improving.’

Below is a story of how one team shifted from proving to improving over a period of 12 months, using Ripple Effects Mapping.

We supported a team to map the ripple effects of a regional project supporting people with complex learning disabilities to enter paid employment.

As part of the mapping we wanted to hear about the challenges the team had faced and not just the things that had gone well. As a successful project who wanted to focus on the good news this was concerning! We were able to show that the maps did highlight the positive impact they had, but that we were trying to move from reporting that proves a project is working well, to reporting that helps us to improve, and for that we need to focus on the challenges too.

Later we sat in on another session, where there was discussion of one of the challenges. A job coach shared a story of how despite their best efforts the person they’d been supporting did not find a paid job, they’d found a voluntary position, so the target for the project had been missed.

A manager who’d been listening to the story described it a different way – ‘but this person is now in a voluntary placement, he has a sense of purpose, he’s happier than he’s ever been in his life. He’s no longer in day services, so the council are making savings, and he’s contacting his social worker less, so there is reduced demand there. You said his whole household is calmer.’ While missing the target there had still been a huge improvement to someone’s life through providing truly person-centred support, even without getting someone into paid employment.

That was the light bulb moment – by mapping out the intended and unintended consequence of the project, both good and bad, we were able to demonstrate  benefits of the project beyond what it was originally set up to achieve. A shift from proving to improving.

How we’ve shared the approach

We shared learning of our Ripple Effects Mapping journey at the MediWales conference in June 2025 alongside Social Care Wales and Life Sciences Hub.

We also hosted a Most Significant Change / Ripple Effects Mapping learning exchange event on 29 September 2025 in partnership with the Developing Evidence Enriched Practice team from Social Care Wales. Our team presented our approach to Ripple Effects Mapping work in the afternoon session.

Storytelling evaluation methods feedback

• People found the event inspiring and thought provoking and left with practical tools they’ll actually use.
• The event helped people rethink what ‘good evidence’ looks like. There was strong emphasis on the power of stories, lived experience, and qualitative insight, alongside numbers.
• Moving from ‘proving’ to improving. A consistent takeaway was the idea that evaluation should help services learn and improve, not just report against targets. People talked about complexity, uncertainty, and the need to focus on relationships and real‑world practice.
• Strong connections and shared learning. The event created space for people to slow down, talk, and connect. Many valued meeting others working in similar ways and said they planned to follow up with new contacts to share learning or collaborate.
• A clear focus on people. Participants repeatedly highlighted the importance of creating safe, human spaces where people can share experiences and learn from one another. Many left feeling inspired to put lived experience and relationships more firmly at the centre of their work.

“It can be difficult to measure whether what we’re doing is helping, particularly when we’re working in complex situations. My takeaway from the day was about the importance of small interventions at a human-level, like taking time to be there for someone or being flexible in your approach. Evaluation methods like MSC and REM can help us understand the little things that really matter to people. I learned a lot from the presenters and everyone who participated in the event and came away informed and inspired!”

Storytelling and positive behaviour support

Another way we’ve been sharing storytelling approaches is by supporting the regional evaluation of the North Wales Together Positive Behaviour Support Implementation Strategy. We particularly focussed on developing and embedding the Most Significant Change storytelling approach. We planned and delivered a workshop at the North Wales Together Positive Behaviour Support event on 29 January 2025, exploring the links between the approaches and emphasising the importance of lived experience and people’s voices in evaluation.

Following the event, we received some lovely feedback, particularly around the conversations we led about making storytelling genuinely inclusive for people who communicate differently.

Since the workshop, we continued working with services across the region to build their confidence and capability in collecting meaningful, person‑centred Most Significant Change stories. This has included advising teams on ethical and accessible story‑gathering methods, supporting them to understand the difference between lived-experience storytelling and traditional case studies, and promoting communication‑inclusive approaches for people who do not use words to communicate.

Alongside this, we’ve contributed to developing a consistent, person­‑centred approach to capturing learning and understanding the impact of the Positive Behaviour Support Implementation Strategy across North Wales.

More information about Positive Behaviour Support is available on the North Wales Together website.

Care and support – what matters to you

Every five years we publish an assessment about the different kinds of care and support needed across North Wales. The Regional Partnership Board use the assessment to plan the services needed to meet people’s needs. The next one is due to be published in April 2027 so our focus this year was on the following.

• Producing research bulletins that provide the number of people needing different kinds of care and support.
• Summarising the research evidence about the different needs people have for care and support.
• Collating people’s stories from engagement activities across North Wales.
• Sharing a survey to find out what matters to people who need care and support.

This work is led by a steering group including representatives from each of the six councils and the health board who link us in with their local data collection and engagement activities.

Our plan is to produce a much simpler assessment this year that sums up the main messages from all the evidence we’ve collected. This will be in addition to the background research papers available on our website for anyone who needs the detail. These are useful for all kinds of things from school projects to funding bids.

This background evidence is regularly reviewed and updated so we always have the most current information available to help us make decisions and allocate resources – we don’t just have to rely on the five year cycle of the statutory needs assessment to form our programme of work, and we can respond quickly to requests for research and information from partners and other stakeholders.

As always, we’re working closely with colleagues writing the overall population well‑being assessment for the Public Services Boards so that we work efficiently together and complete work once for North Wales wherever possible. We’ve submitted a good practice case study about our approach to Welsh Government to inform the new guidance on assessments. We want to make the most efficient use of research resources, and aim to share the same key messages from the evidence.

We also answer queries for people. Please contact us at nwrich@denbighshire.gov.uk if you need numbers to support integrated health and social care work in North Wales.

Updates published in 2025/26

• Population profile for North Wales
• Neurodevelopmental conditions in children and young people.
• Neurodevelopmental conditions in working age adults.
• Children with disabilities.
• Key indicators of mental health in children and young people.
• Estimates of the prevalence of dementia in North Wales.
• Focus on dementia in North Wales.
• Unpaid carers
• Housing and homelessness

We’ve taken a new approach to our updates this year, where we’ve included the key message from each paragraph in the heading itself. So if you look at the contents page of the report you can get a quick overview of the main messages. We’re finding this helpful and hope you do too. Any feedback please let us know.

View the statistics and research pages on the regional collaboration website.

Literature searches and evidence summaries

Our specialist librarian carries out searches to find out what research has already been done on a topic or examples of best practice. During the year, we carried out 61 literature searches and produced 12 evidence summaries.

Evidence summaries published this year

• Challenges facing unpaid carers
• Challenges facing young carers
• Children and young people in need of care and support
• Children’s mental health
• Domiciliary care
• Homelessness
• Learning disabilities
• Neurodivergence
• Older people and dementia
• Refugees and asylum seekers
• Veterans
• Violence against women

If you work with the Regional Partnership Board on integrated health and social care projects in North Wales and would like to request a search, please contact our Specialist Librarian.

Carers Rights Day: what the numbers do and don’t tell us about unpaid care

To celebrate Carer’s Rights Day this year, Wrexham County Borough Council hosted an event for unpaid carers and organisations that support them at Tŷ Pawb in Wrexham.

Our RIC hub team went along and found it a real privilege to hear carers of all ages talking about their experiences. The stories we heard highlighted the value of the work unpaid carers do and the support they need.

We’d been asked to talk about statistics about unpaid carers. The figures that surprised us – like having fewer unpaid carers than 10 years earlier (most likely due to Covid restrictions when the data was collected for the 2021 Census) and the £2.3 billion it would cost in North Wales to replace unpaid care with paid care. The figures that weren’t such a surprise included people providing a lot more hours of unpaid care in total and the impact this has on carers’ health and well-being.

We shared our ‘Match the Census Statistic to the North Wales County Quiz’. The audience could raise their hands or giving a little wiggle when they heard the answer they thought was right, and they played their part brilliantly. The quiz explored the differences across North Wales such as Gwynedd having a lower proportion of unpaid carers (probably because of the students at the university being less likely to be carers) and Conwy having the second highest proportion of older people of any county in Wales.

We know the numbers don’t tell us everything, so we also asked people to let us know where the statistics didn’t match their experiences as unpaid carers.

All the information we talked about (and more) is available on our website in statistics about unpaid carers in North Wales.

Women’s health conference

We attended the Women’s Health Conference in Bangor on 4 March 2026, which brought together women to share experiences and learning about improving support across different life stages. A recurring theme was the need for services to be shaped by women’s lived experience, so support better reflects what people actually need.

On our stand we highlighted what we’ve learned about women and health and social care including that:

• Women take on most unpaid care, supporting family members through illness, disability, and aging. There are 39,200 female carers compared to 27,650 male carers in North Wales.
• Women live longer, which means they’re more likely to experience illnesses of old age like dementia and need later-life support. Two-thirds of people aged 85 and over are women.
• Women and girls are often underdiagnosed in conditions like neurodivergence and heart disease. Not because symptoms are uncommon, but because research hasn’t always included women or taken their experiences on board.
• Women are more likely to experience financial hardship especially as carers, through disability or illness, or in later life.
• Violence against women and girls remains a major societal issue.

The animatronic cat and dog helped draw people to the stand. The RPB team provided these to selected people living with dementia across North Wales who we think would enjoy their company. Feedback is being collected about the impact they have.

Our main aim for the day was to promote the survey for our Population Needs Assessment and we made some great connections with people who’ve distributed the survey widely for us.

Digital, data and technology innovation

Our achievements this year through the North Wales Digital, Data and Technology Partnership Board.

The board agreed to adopt the Welsh Local Government Association’s (WLGA) Digital in Social Care (DiSC) framework, which aligned well with our priorities.

Big change

The national Connecting Care Programme includes procuring and implementing new case management systems for social care, mental health and community health and developing shared care records for health and social care.

The RIC hub team stepped in to facilitate the North Wales programme until the new programme manager started in October 2025. Our support meant that the procurement and initial implementation plans for the new social care system were integrated both regionally and nationally. We’ve shared our learning from the procurement process with the DiSC framework team to help spread good practice.

Progress is now underway in implementing the new social care case management system across North Wales.

Bright ideas

Last year’s Digital Showcase Event continued to support innovative practice long‑after we were all packed away. The event prompted applications to the Iechyd a Mwy innovation support panel and Contracts for Innovation funding. It also led to technology company involvement in the DiSC framework. We’ve written up what we learned from the process and made it available on our website for anyone planning a similar event: Digital showcase – what we learned.

A member of our team was a judge at the Social Care Wales accolades in the effective use of digital and technology. This was a great opportunity to get out and about across Wales to see innovations across the country in practice and bring back ideas to implement here. For more information see: Social Care Wales 2026 Accolades.

We continued to update our innovative projects list, which we shared with the WLGA to support the national ‘bright ideas’ work programme. We also continued to meet as part of a North Wales innovation network, although not as often as we would have liked due to staff changes and competing priorities. This is something we hope to refresh next year as a way to share ideas and learning within the health and social care innovation ecosystem in North Wales.

Brilliant basics

Last year we reported the challenges we’d had with rolling out regional SharePoint sites. So this year we’re delighted to report we now have three pilot regional SharePoint sites up and running!

As a regional team we work closely with colleagues from the six local councils in North Wales, the health board and others. A regular request in terms of getting the basics right was a simple solution to support document sharing and collaboration for regional projects. We looked at a few different options and SharePoint was the preferred choice because of the way it integrates with the Microsoft Office products already used by our partner organisations.

Below is the North Wales Population Needs Assessment document sharing site where partners can upload background documents to inform the assessment and can comment on and amend draft versions of the report.

Other work on getting the basics right for people means that health and social care staff can now work together on Microsoft Teams. We’re also exploring how we can improve calendar sharing for integrated teams.

Virtual healthcare for rural communities

Last year we secured support from the Digital Data and Technology Board and BCUHB leads to work with Rural Health and Care Wales, Powys RIC Hub and West Wales RIC Hub on ways to improve virtual healthcare for rural communities. We are now at the stage where we are applying for funding for this project, watch this space!

Building knowledge

This strand of the DiSC framework is about identifying, evaluating and sharing existing practices, pilots and projects. This is an area of the board’s work we’ll be looking to improve next year, starting with developing a digital strategy for North Wales.

This year we’ve worked with Social Care Wales, Welsh Government and the Office for National Statistics to provide feedback to help improve data sharing platforms.

Cross-cutting themes

These include cyber, infrastructure, inclusion, procurement and leadership. Digital inclusion continues to be a key priority in North Wales and we’re working closely with Digital Inclusion Wales on this. We’re also working with Ambition North Wales to improve the infrastructure for digital technologies such as WiFi and 4G networks.

Is lack of WiFi or mobile phone signal stopping you providing good health and social care in North Wales? If so, please get in touch with the team at nwrich@denbighshire.gov.uk so we can help to fix this.

What we’ve learned

Inspired by the Human Learning Systems approach that ‘what works’ in complex systems is to keep experimenting and learning, here are some of things we’ve learned this year.

• The importance of regularly reviewing evidence when making claims in health and social care policy.
• How to use PowerBI to create dashboards and the importance of data quality in generating meaningful insights from dashboards.
• The importance of evaluation methods that focus on improving rather than proving.
• We’ve been experimenting with using Artificial Intelligence in the team. So far, we think it’s as good (if not better) at writing headlines and summaries than us and could save us a lot of time when it comes to taking notes in meetings. But it’s not nearly as good yet at finding, analysing and presenting data. We’ve found it’s best for work where you know what good looks like – a useful tool rather than a substitute for expertise.

Learning about engagement

• Making best use of people’s time. As a partnership our partners are often asking the same people the same questions. We set up an Engagement Database to encourage people to make better use of others’ work so that we can build on conversations with the public rather than repeating them. We’re encouraging people to share findings with us ready for our 2027 Population Needs Assessment.
• Asking the right people the right questions. Taking note of the perspective someone is speaking from. For example, someone talking about their own lived experience, the experience of someone they support or about other people. In the dementia listening exercise we had hundreds of responses talking in theory about involving people living with dementia in their local community, and then a response from someone living with dementia who said community involvement was the absolute last thing they wanted. It would have been easy to miss that response but it’s vital for planning services that provide what matters to people.
• Digging beneath the surface of what people are telling us. Prompted by this article: Rethinking Barriers and Enablers in Qualitative Health Research: Limitations, Alternatives, and Enhancements. Trying to do this in our Ripple Effects Mapping work, we’ve built in reflection time to the process to learn and improve the way we ask questions and analyse the maps with at least one other person so they can challenge each other’s assumptions.

Sometimes the best learning comes from things that didn’t go to plan – here are some examples.

Getting ahead of ourselves with the SharePoint pilot

While we were waiting for our new SharePoint sites, we started experimenting with some of the options they would make available, like Microsoft Lists. This seemed like a great solution to the ever-multiplying spreadsheets we were using to try and keep track of our projects and programmes. We set up a pilot for the team that oversee our capital funded projects, and it worked great (at first) – it was simple for them to all update the same document, while also setting up their own views of the database to easily keep track and update their own projects, with reporting through Microsoft PowerBI.

What we didn’t realise, is that there’s no simple way to transfer a Microsoft List from one SharePoint site to another. It’s been very fiddly to try and recreate our experimental List and PowerBI system in the new site. If we had our time again, we would have waited until the SharePoint was all set up before getting ahead of ourselves!

Being taken aback by AI

This is a bit embarrassing for an innovation team, but we can’t learn from our mistakes if we’re not honest about them. We did not see the rise in AI notetakers coming this year. AI notetakers can make notes about a conversation between a health or social care worker and the person they are supporting. This has great potential for saving time and improving the quality of conversations by letting the people involved focus on listening and communication rather than note-taking.

We had looked at the guidelines and ethics around AI in health and care back in February 2025 to try to get prepared, but it still moved faster than we expected.

There are multiple pilot projects in health and social care across Wales, including in North Wales, and we are only just starting to get a handle on them. There are a lot of questions about whether organisations should be investing in them and which ones? Will they help us support people better and how do people feel about this?

This is something that we plan to explore next year as part of our digital social care strategy. The strategy is also part of our plan to try and get ahead of these developments by having a very clear idea of what the issues are in social care that we think could benefit from digital solutions in future.

When the numbers don’t add up

Reviewing the data for the Population Needs Assessment we’ve found a lot of changes in the type of data that’s being collected and the way it’s shared which have made things a bit more difficult for us. Some of these issues are fairly fundamental – organisations like the Office for National Statistics often rely on surveys to produce statistics but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find people to complete the surveys. If you can’t get a representative sample of people to take part, then you can’t rely on the survey data.

We’ve shared the problems we’re finding with people at a national level who may be able to help, and we’re taking part in an IMPACT network, working with colleagues across Wales to look at how we use data to improve services.

In the meantime, we’re developing alternative statistics and approaches we can use to fill in the gaps. This includes the work we’ve done around storytelling and engagement and shifting our focus to what matters to the people we support. We also try to explain the advantages and limitations of the different data sources we use in our research bulletins, so people can make a judgement about how robust the data might be for their own research and information needs.

Communication and engagement

What’s new on our website

We’ve been supporting the Regional Partnership Board to share good news stories about the work they’re doing to integrate health and social care across the region. This year we’ve shared the following press releases across North Wales:

• June and July 2025 North Wales Together: Learning Disability Week Hiking and Biking Challenge
• Nov 2025 North Wales Together: Regional Supported Employment Service
• Jan 2026 Care and support in North Wales – tell us what matters
• Coming soon: more information about the capital funded projects.

This is in addition to the regular blog posts we share about work happening across North Wales. Our most popular posts during the year were the eisteddfod launch for new resources to support children and families, a post about age and dementia friendly Holywell and an update about the Digital Social Care Showcase 2025.

Our Population Needs Assessment page is still one of the most visited on the website, here are the top five pages.

• North Wales Regional Partnership Board (2,900 views)
• North Wales Memory Support Pathway (2,500 views)
• North Wales Population Needs Assessment (1,400 views)
• North Wales Dementia Centres (1,300 views)
• Emotional Health, Well-being and Resilience Framework (730 views)

Newsletters

We shared 10 newsletters during the year full of information about research, innovation, and improvement activities and another 26 people subscribed to our newsletter taking the total to 250.

Social media update

We joined Bluesky in December 2024 and have over half as many followers there as on X (Twitter). Please come and join us @nwrich.bsky.social.

Our number of X (Twitter) followers has hovered around 437 this year, while our Bluesky followers have grown to 264.

The social media accounts have been used to share good ideas, ongoing projects, innovations from across the UK, relevant events, and live tweets from conferences. They have also been used to promote the support our team and other organisations can offer, to help with health and social care projects in North Wales.

How we plan for the year ahead

There are two main drivers for our work programme – the priorities from Welsh Government for the RIC Hub network to work on together (the Innovations Working at Scale Programme) and the priorities from the North Wales Regional Partnership Board for research and innovation.

How we work with partners to shape our programme

Within these planned priorities, our work programme is shaped through ongoing engagement with partners across the health and social care system. Much of our research and innovation work emerges from practice, where boards, programmes and teams identify challenges or opportunities that would benefit from additional evidence, evaluation or innovation support.

During the year we receive requests and ideas from a wide range of partners working towards Regional Partnership Board priorities. Recent examples include a request from the North Wales Adult Service Heads (NWASH) for support to develop a digital strategy and requests from the Children’s Regional Partnership Board for project evaluation.

We take a responsive but focused approach to this work. While not all activity can be planned in advance, we apply clear criteria when agreeing new pieces of work. These include:

• alignment with regional and national priorities
• potential to support learning, improvement or innovation adoption
• benefit to more than one organisation or part of the system
• readiness and capacity (both ours and partners’) to do the work well

This approach allows us to both plan intentionally for the year ahead and remain open to partner‑led opportunities as they arise. It reflects the reality of working in research and innovation, where responding to emerging questions is essential to generating relevant evidence, supporting improvement and ensuring our work remains grounded in what matters to the people we support.

During 2026/27 we will track how partner‑led requests align with our agreed priority areas and use this to reflect on where the team’s support has had the greatest impact and where future capacity should be focused.

What’s next

• Scaling what works across North Wales and Wales more widely – working with the national RIC Hub network to identify, test and roll out proven innovations, including the warm homes project and other ideas ready for wider adoption.
• Strengthening evaluation and learning – continuing to support partners with practical, learning‑based evaluation approaches (including Ripple Effects Mapping and Most Significant Change) to understand what makes the biggest difference, which approaches are cost effective and help effective projects continue.
• Improving access to evidence, data and insight – expanding access to research, evidence reviews and regional intelligence, and delivering the North Wales Population Needs Assessment 2027 to support better planning, coordination and decision‑making across health and social care.
• Supporting digital, data and technology transformation – working through the North Wales Digital, Data and Technology Partnership Board to improve digital foundations, promote digital inclusion and identify technology‑enabled approaches that support more seamless, integrated care.

Contact us

Phone: 01824 712432

Email: nwrich@denbighshire.gov.uk

Social media:

• BlueSky: @hcargc.bsky.social / @nwrich.bsky.social  
• X (Twitter): @NW_RICH_ / @_NW_RICH

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