Health Technology Wales (HTW) celebrated its second anniversary with an event to showcase the impact it’s making on health and care in Wales.
Stakeholders from a variety of sectors joined several key decision makers, who delivered a series of thought-provoking talks about HTW’s role to support a national approach to the identification, appraisal and adoption of non-medicine technologies.
Susan Myles, Director of Health Technology Wales said:
“It’s been a real pleasure to mark our second anniversary with representatives from our broad range of stakeholders and to demonstrate the difference we’re making for them. We’ve achieved a lot over the last two years. Today we’re celebrating the impact we’ve made for people and care services in Wales, but we’re also taking the opportunity to share and shape our plans for the future.”
The talks began with Dr Frank Atherton, Chief Medical Officer for Wales, who focused on the ways HTW is addressing the recommendations from the 2014 inquiry into ‘Access to medical technologies.’ He also covered their work to target the Welsh Government’s health and care priority areas.
Ifan Evans, Director of Technology, Digital and Transformation for Welsh Government, followed and talked about how HTW is supporting innovation and its busy work programme. HTW’s processes speed up the technology appraisal and adoption cycle in Wales, enabling Wales to be responsive to the constantly changing technology landscape.
A talk about HTW’s work to identify non-medicine health technologies was delivered by Dr Rob Orford, Chief Scientific Adviser for Health to the Welsh Government. Over 120 topics have been suggested to us since we were established in 2017, including 83 to our Open Topic Calls.
Professor Peter Groves, Chair of HTW, led the discussion about the appraisal work. There’s an estimated 77,600 people impacted by our Guidance (per year) and potential cost savings of £5,240,000 (per year)* from our Guidance. Click here to learn more about HTW’s impact.
HTW has collaborated with the Bevan Commission throughout 2018 and 2019. Helen Howson, Director of the Bevan Commission, headed a talk about the adoption of HTW Guidance. It detailed how HTW is working to maximise impact and enable evidence-informed decision making by health and care commissioners.
There were a number of activities for attendees to interact with throughout the day. HTW partnered up with illustration students at the University of South Wales to design evaluation boards. Attendees told HTW how they feel it’s making a difference and were then asked them to make a pledge to for 2020.
Click here to download the slidesets.
Health Technology Wales is happy to announce the publication of the Annual Report 2018-2019.
It’s the first annual report published by the organisation and highlights what it has achieved since it was launched in November 2017 to improve the quality of care in Wales.
You can stay updated with HTW’s future work by clicking here to subscribe to the mailing list.
*This figure is based on the assumption that there would be 50% technology uptake in the absence of HTW Guidance.