The legislative and policy landscape in Wales provides strategic direction to public bodies and those discharging the functions of a public body, including health and social care. Alignment of cluster activities to these will ensure the priorities of strategic partners collectively drive improvements in population health and reduce inequalities across Wales.
Key legislation, policy and guidance relevant to those working within primary and community care include:
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The Well-being of Future Generations Act (WBFG) aims to improve the social, economic, environmental and cultural well-being of Wales. The Act gives a legally-binding common purpose – the 7 well-being goals – for national government, local government, local health boards and other specified public bodies.
The seven Well-being goals include:
The Act details the ways in which specified public bodies must work, and work together to improve the well-being of Wales, these ‘sustainable development principles’ are also referred to as the five ways of working:
A Healthier Wales is one of the seven well-being goals. A Healthier Wales: our Plan for Health and Social Care sets out a long term future vision of a ‘whole system approach to health and social care’, which is focussed on health and wellbeing, and on preventing illness. With a focus on the quadruple aim:
The Public Sector Equality Duty is a statutory duty on public authorities and other bodies carrying out public functions. It ensures that those organisations consider how their functions will affect people with different protected characteristics. These functions include their policies, programmes, planning and service delivery. As well as the general duty, the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) regulations set out additional specific duties that are different in England, Scotland and Wales. Specific duties that apply in Wales have been summarised by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
The Socio-economic Duty came into force in Wales on the 31 March 2021. It is a statutory requirement for relevant authorities and aims to drive forward better decision making and deliver better outcomes for those who are socio-economically disadvantaged. A five stage approach has been developed to provide guidance to public bodies on how they may meet the Duty in practice.
Welsh Government have produced A More Equal Wales Mapping the Duties, document to help public bodies consider their functions in discharging the duties of the Equality Act and the Well-being of Future Generations Act.
The Duty of Quality in Healthcare was introduced through the Health and Social Care (Quality and Engagement) (Wales) Act 2020 (‘the Act’). The Act places an overarching duty of quality on the Welsh Ministers regarding their health-related functions. It broadens the existing duty on NHS bodies (Local Health Boards, NHS Trusts, and Welsh Special Health Authorities).
The purpose of the duty of quality is to ensure that Welsh Ministers and NHS bodies secure improvements in the quality of services they provide. There are six domains of quality that ensure decisions made deliver care that is safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable and person-centred.
The Programme for Government sets out the 10 well-being objectives that the Welsh government will use to maximise its contribution to Wales’ 7 long-term well-being goals and the steps we will take to deliver them.