Our Plans & Priorities - October 2023 - March 2024

About Llais

We listen to your views and experiences on health and social care in Wales and we share these with decision makers in the National Health Service (NHS) and social care services.

We do not work for the NHS, Local Authorities or the Government.

We stand alone, we are independent.

We want everyone in Wales to have a say in the design, planning and delivery of health and social care services so that those services are right for you.

We listen locally, so that we can understand local and regional issues, and work nationally to make an impact. We support people and communities in all parts of Wales so that everyone’s voice can be heard.

Our first 6 months

We started our work on 1 April 2023. We replaced the 7 Community Health Councils in Wales and the Board of Community Health Councils in Wales, and we picked up the things that the Community Health Councils were working on.

We have been continuing to support people and communities through our engagement, involvement with service changes and our complaints advocacy service. At the same time, we have been learning how to do things in ways that will support our duties and responsibilities, as one independent body.

We needed to put in place new systems and ways of working that supported us to carry out our work. This included things like bringing in new staff and volunteers, new information technology, and new ways of working that help us do our job in ways that work best for you.

We also brought in new arrangements to make sure we take decisions in the best way and keep looking at how things are going so that we can be sure we are doing the right things in the right way, and spending public money in the way you would expect.

Some of this is taking longer than we would have wanted and we have learnt important lessons along the way.

We also had new things to learn and new people to meet. We would like to thank all our new partners, people and communities who have been so helpful in working with us on our shared aims of improving health and social care in Wales.

We know that it’s important we get the basics right first. So we made sure we spent our first 100 days listening, to you and our partners, to find out what mattered most to you, and to hear about how we could do our job in the way you want.

More of the detail of what you told us in our first 100 days can be found in our report - Our First 100 Days Report

What's next?

Setting up a new organisation in the most difficult times for health and social care services and public services more generally hasn’t been easy. We are up for the challenge and changing how we work to make sure we have a positive impact.

Many of us are already struggling with the rising costs we face in our daily lives. For lots of us, this has changed how we stay healthy, access health and care and get the care we need when and where we need it. A global pandemic has resulted in some people waiting too long for the treatment they need, or waiting too long to come out of hospital because the right type of care cant be put in place. This has been very hard for everyone affected.

Recently finding out that the health and care services we need, and rely on, will now need to make cuts too is very worrying. It is also worrying that here in Wales more people than ever are going to need support to stay healthy and lead independent lives.

So, as health and social care services look to do things differently, we want to work with you to make sure YOUR voice is heard and acted upon.

Your regional priorities

There are lots of things we could be working on in each of the regions across Wales. To make sure we have the most impact in the next 6 months we have used what you have told us and what we know from others to choose 3 main priorities in each region.

We will speak with local people in lots of different places about each of the priorities so we can understand how things are working for you now, and what needs to happen next. We will speak to local communities, listen to people with direct experience of services and involve service providers.

We will share what we learn with decision makers and work with them, and you, to make a difference. We will make sure that you are kept in touch with what’s going on as a result.

As well as working on the 3 main priorities, our regional teams will also:

- be out and about in our communities to hear from you about the things that matter most to you about health and social care services, including when there are plans to change services
- be there for you if you want to write to us, talk to us by phone, video conference or in person about health and social care services
- support you to raise a concern about your health and social care services through our confidential complaints advocacy service.

We will bring organisations and communities together to help us clearly understand the problems.

We will involve them in creating some ways to make things better.

We will let everyone know what difference their involvement has had.

We have also heard that you are getting fed up with all the consultations and engagements that you are being asked to take part in.

So, we will lead a project that looks at the ways we can bring health, social services, government and charities together to work with you on common issues that you want to talk about.

This will be in a coordinated way that works best for you and we will make sure you know what has happened as a result.

Our priorities

Over the next 6 months and beyond we have lots more to do that you may not be able to see. It is still very important we get this foundation right as we do work internally to make us a better organisation externally for you and our partners.

Image

What’s comes after March 2024?

If you’ve read all of this plan, firstly thanks for sticking with us. Secondly you will have noticed how ambitious it is.

We are really pushing ourselves to develop as quickly as possible so we can have the most impact for you. That means we will probably make some mistakes along the way, or things won’t always work out how we’d planned. It’s important that we take time to learn from our actions and activities to understand what works for you and what we do differently from our experiences in our first year.

Being this ambitious also means we may not get everything done. If this happens, we will say why, look at our priorities again, and if they are still important in April 2024 we will roll these over into next year’s plan for the year.

Being responsive to what you are telling us, and what we learn from other places, also means that we may have to change our priorities after we have written this plan. If that happens, we will tell you why, and show you where we have changed it.

In April 2024 we will be

sharing our strategy for the future. It will tell you what our vision is for Llais and how we want to help you and our partners improve health and social services, the way we want to do that, and how we think we can do it.

In April 2024 we will share

a new annual plan that focuses on what goals we want to hit by March 2025 and explains the steps along the way.