It’s vital that we are open and transparent about our work in reviewing and setting technical standards. Our work is much more than a dry and dusty catalogue of standards but instead we must work in partnership, with colleagues across health and care within Wales, but also with external partners. I envisage open technical standards as the loosely-coupled connections between our data and computing services and applications, and so by extension, also help to define the connections between our teams.

Today we held the October 2019 meeting of the Welsh Technical Standards Board. In our work plan, we had recognised the need to define some broad architectural principles which should apply to work within health and care in Wales. Ann Wrightson, head of information architecture at Aneurin Bevan Health Board, led this work and presented it at our September meeting, and today, we approved it. This is envisaged as a living document that will be updated over time to adapt and flex to our changing requirements.

Today we had the June meeting of the Welsh Technical Standards Board (WTSB). One of my core aims is openness and transparency, and debating the best ways to deliver what we want to achieve. These are my personal reflections rather than a formal opinion from WTSB. When possible, we also publish our more formal minutes. It’s really important to me that standards are not seen as an authoritarian, centrally-controlled didactic sets of commandments sent from on-high.

Our mission is to : support the creation and maintenance of a catalogue of standards and requirements to enable integration and interoperability across all health and care systems in a consistent and secure manner, and to support local innovation and the use of third party delivery partners. from WTSB Terms of Reference And we are working hard to build that catalogue. But is that all we need to do?

“When we set out to write software, we never know enough. Knowledge on the project is fragmented, scattered among many people and documents, and it’s mixed with other information so that we don’t even know which bits of knowledge we really need. Domains that seem less technically daunting can be deceiving: we don’t realize how much we don’t know. This ignorance leads us to make false assumptions.” Excerpt From: Eric Evans.

On the 18th December, the Welsh Technical Standards Board discussed how we might draft some broad principles and a statement of intent, setting out our broad approach, our ethos, our principles and how we were going to tackle the work we need to do, so that, in effect, we set the standards to enable us to build a truly open platform for health and care in Wales. After lots of discussion and debate, we submitted our work to Wales’ National Informatics Management Boards and they were endorsed in a meeting on 11th April 2019.

Our September NHS Wales Technical Standards Board was held on the 27th September. We have been asked to identify, assess, set and assure technical principles and standards in NHS Wales. That means we need to build a catalogue of standards, including standards that are already in use as well as standards that should be used for new developments. We must recognise a need for pragmatism, so a catalogue must include not only information about that technical standard but how it should be implemented and used.

We held the second meeting of the Welsh Technical Standards Board (WTSB) today and I am delighted to announce that we have formally adopted the GDS Design Principles for use by NHS Wales. These are: Start with user needs Do less Design with data Do the hard work to make it simple Iterate. Then iterate again This is for everyone Understand context Build digital services, not websites Be consistent, not uniform Make things open: it makes things better In addition, we have agreed to adopt the Welsh Government Digital Service Standard:

I am delighted to announce that I have been asked to chair the new Welsh Technical Standards Board (WTSB) for NHS Wales. We will support the creation and maintenance of a catalogue of standards and requirements to enable integration and interoperability across all health and care systems in a consistent and secure manner, and to support local innovation and the use of third party delivery partners. The scope of this Board covers: