Wales Healthcare Analytics

Healthcare Analytics for NHS Wales Health Boards

NHS Wales operates through 7 Health Boards and 3 NHS Trusts, each facing a distinct combination of rural isolation, bilingual service delivery obligations, and the longest patient waiting times in the United Kingdom. Vizier provides Welsh Health Boards with the clinical intelligence infrastructure to tackle a waiting list crisis with data — rather than simply more reporting.

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35%+of Welsh patients waiting over 36 weeks — longest in the UK
Healthcare Landscape

Wales's Waiting Time and Bilingual Data Challenge

NHS Wales is structured around seven Health Boards — Aneurin Bevan, Cardiff and Vale, Betsi Cadwaladr, Cwm Taf Morgannwg, Hywel Dda, Powys Teaching, and Swansea Bay — plus three NHS Trusts covering specialist services including Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust and Velindre Cancer Centre. The Welsh Government's long-term health strategy, A Healthier Wales, sets a 2035 vision centred on prevention, co-production, and seamless health and social care integration. The immediate operational reality, however, is dominated by a waiting list crisis that has left more than 35% of Welsh patients waiting longer than 36 weeks for treatment — the worst performance of any UK nation.

Powys Teaching Health Board is the largest Health Board by geographic area in the UK, covering 25% of Wales's landmass yet serving fewer than 135,000 people — the lowest population density of any Health Board in Britain. Providing equitable access to planned care, mental health services, and chronic disease management across mid-Wales requires a fundamentally different analytical approach to that used in urban Cardiff and Vale or Swansea Bay. Additionally, NHS Wales has a statutory Welsh language duty under the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011: Health Boards must provide services in Welsh and record patient language preferences, creating bilingual documentation and analytics requirements that are unique in the UK health system. Cross-border patient flows — Welsh residents attending hospitals in Herefordshire, Shropshire, or Cheshire — add a further layer of complexity to activity and cost data reconciliation.

7
NHS Wales Health Boards plus 3 NHS Trusts
35%+
patients waiting over 36 weeks — UK's longest waits
25%
of Wales covered by Powys — UK's lowest population density Health Board
3.1M
people served by NHS Wales
How Vizier Helps

Wales-Specific Analytics Solutions

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Waiting List Prioritisation Analytics
With over 35% of Welsh patients waiting more than 36 weeks, Health Boards cannot manage their backlog on waiting time alone. Vizier analyses Referral to Treatment (RTT) data alongside clinical deterioration signals, comorbidity profiles, and socioeconomic vulnerability scores to identify patients whose conditions are most likely to worsen during extended waits — enabling clinical prioritisation rather than simple queue management.
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Bilingual Welsh/English Documentation Analytics
NHS Wales Health Boards have a statutory duty to provide services in Welsh and must track patient language preferences across clinical systems. Vizier supports bilingual data environments, ensuring that Welsh-medium clinical documentation contributes equally to population health cohort analysis, quality reporting, and performance benchmarking — without creating parallel reporting burdens for Welsh-speaking communities.
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Cross-Border and Rural Access Analytics
Welsh patients near the English border — particularly in Powys and parts of Betsi Cadwaladr — frequently receive secondary care in English hospitals under cross-border commissioned services. Vizier reconciles activity data across Welsh and English provider systems, giving Health Boards a complete picture of population healthcare utilisation regardless of where services are delivered, and quantifying the cost of cross-border referral patterns.
Regulatory & Standards Context

NHS Wales Compliance Requirements

NHS Wales organisations are regulated by the Welsh Government's Health and Social Services Group, with Healthcare Inspectorate Wales (HIW) fulfilling the scrutiny role equivalent to the Care Quality Commission in England. Quality improvement is led by Quality and Patient Safety: Wales (QPSW, formerly part of NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership), while Public Health Wales provides national epidemiological intelligence. Health Boards report activity data through the Patient Episode Database for Wales (PEDW) — the Welsh equivalent of the NHS England Secondary Uses Service — and must meet Welsh Government performance targets on waiting times, mental health, and cancer care.

The Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 and associated NHS standards require Health Boards to operate Welsh language schemes, record patient language preferences, and ensure that analytics outputs are capable of reflecting bilingual service provision. UK GDPR applies across NHS Wales, and all Health Boards participate in the NHS Wales Information Governance Toolkit. The A Healthier Wales strategy's 2035 goals create a longer-term framework for digital health investment and value-based care transition that shapes data infrastructure priorities across the Welsh NHS.

Regulatory Body
Healthcare Inspectorate Wales (HIW), Welsh Government Health Directorate
Standards
PEDW, UK GDPR, Welsh Language Measure 2011, NHS Wales IG Toolkit
Key Programmes
A Healthier Wales 2035, RTT waiting time targets, Welsh Cancer Network, mental health standards
Get Started

NHS Wales Health Boards are transforming data into clinical intelligence.

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