Public Health Wales has announced the launch of a new digital platform designed to tackle health inequalities in Wales, which will draw together information, case studies and past interventions to encourage the sharing of good practice.
The Welsh Health Equity Solutions Platform is described as “a gateway to data, evidence, health economics and modelling, policies, good practice, innovative tools and practical solutions”.
Functionalities include enabling users to view health economics resources, explore current Welsh policies and legislation, and generate and download customised reports filtered by information type. Users are also able to tailor the tool to fit their specific areas of interest and can produce outputs and insights to help inform their work.
The platform has been developed by the Policy and International Health team within the WHO Collaborating Centre on Investment for Health and Wellbeing, and will feed into an overarching WHO health equity gateway. It is to be continuously updated with future projects and case studies, with Public Health Wales stating that it is “informed and shaped by continuous stakeholder and user feedback and emerging evidence, and reflecting dynamic national and global priorities.”
The announcement follows the publication of the Welsh government’s Diagnostics Recovery and Transformation Strategy for Wales 2023-2025, where one of the key aims is to create a sustainable and intelligent integrated health system which reduces inequality. It also follows a report from Public Health Wales in which statistics estimated that inequality in hospital service use costs hospitals in Wales £322 million every year. The report noted that £9 of every £100 spent in hospitals is spent as “a result of continued health inequalities, amounting in Wales to around a third of a billion pounds every year”.
It serves as an example of the Welsh government’s commitment to harnessing digital technologies to tackle current health and care challenges, made apparent through its call for innovations last summer.
An animation has been produced to demonstrate the new platform’s functionality and tools, available to view below.
