North Wales Regional Innovation Coordination Hub’s work with North Wales Children’s Regional Partnership Board

What is the project?

The North Wales Regional Innovation Coordination Hub (RIC Hub) coordinates research, innovation and improvement activity in North Wales around how health and social care services can improve the way they work together.

One of the bodies the RIC Hub supports is the North Wales Children’s Regional Partnership Board (CRPB). The hub pulls together research, statistics and the stories of children and families in each of the CRPB’s priority areas. This year it published the findings of its focus on disability and illness.

It also carried out a focus on neurodiversity. For this it set up a small steering group which came up with questions about challenges facing neurodevelopmental services and the best ways to support children, young people and families. It looked at a wide range of evidence to try to answer these questions and pulled it all together in a 100-page information pack, including stories from families about living with neurodiversity.

As part of a workshop based around the information pack, the CRPB watched a video about a local family’s experiences of waiting for a neurodevelopment assessment.

The CRPB explored questions about how members could work better together to provide support.

Why is it being carried out?

It can take a long time to have an assessment to see if a child or young person has a neurodevelopmental condition.

One way the CRPB would like to improve this process is to support children and families based on the needs they have rather than the diagnosis. They call this approach ‘the right door’. Wherever you go to find support – at school, a community service, social service, or health service - you’ll get help. It’s also part of the core principles set out in the NEST framework.

The RIC Hub is part of the Welsh Government commitment in A Healthier Wales to establish a nationally coordinated network of hubs to inform new integrated models of health and social care.

Where and when is the work taking place?

The RIC Hub launched in March 2020 and is currently funded by Welsh Government until March 2025, but it’s hoped this work will be able to continue beyond that.

The focus on neurodiversity has now finished, but the hub continues to work with the CRPB to help make sure this work makes a difference to children and families in North Wales. For example, by supporting work to improve information sharing so that organisations can work together better to support families with neurodiversity.

Who’s involved?

The RIC Hub invites those involved in any health and social care research, innovation or improvement projects to work with it to promote their work and make links with other projects.

It supports the North Wales Regional Partnership Board (RPB) and Children’s Regional Partnership Board (CRPB).

The RIC Hub has been experimenting with different ways of bringing people together to learn and find new ways of working. Building on its prior work with the Developing Evidence Enriched Practice (DEEP) project, Co-production Lab Wales has also been working with the hub as a facilitator to find creative solutions to getting the best out of meetings.

What have they learnt from the work?

Some of the themes that came out of the neurodiversity discussion were:

• the importance of effective communication
• having the ‘family’s voice’ at the heart of service design and delivery
• the need for effective data systems, enabling data sharing and providing a rich picture to inform decision making
• the cultural challenges of effective multi-agency collaboration
• the importance of building relationships and establishing trust, in all directions.

From this work the Hub and CRPB also learnt that there’s a lot happening already to try and improve services for neurodiverse children and young people in North Wales. Some examples can be found on the CRPB’s focus on children and young people neurodevelopment webpage.

The RIC Hub hoped to produce a succinct information pack about neurodiversity in children. But they found that the complexity of the subject meant that 100 pages was as short as they could get it without losing key information.

How to get in touch

To find out more about this project, please contact Sarah Bartlett at North Wales RIC Hub.