Below is the speech I made at the May 2013 States’ meeting during the debate on the Medical Officer of Health’s Annual Report.
Sir,
I would like to follow up what Deputy Bebb brought up yesterday in relation to the availability of information and resources to obtain and analyse it.
One of the things that struck me most about this report, and has been highlighted by the placing of the 4 amendments, is that, bar environmental health statistics and those on births and deaths, there is a distinct lack of quality data available upon which to make strong evidence-based decisions.
In fact, a quarter of the 29 recommendations actually relate to the need for better information.
There is nothing new here. In 2009, the Welsh Audit Office noted that “decision making within the States is often…..not supported by an adequate evidential base”.
In their report on Developing SAP and Shared services in October 2011, the T&R Department stated that;
Access to high quality, credible information is critical in developing any proposal laid before the States, and delivery of this project will give policy groups, departmental boards and staff significantly improved access to robust data. Not only will the tools available be enhanced but the quality of underlying data will be greatly improved through a combination of data cleansing during implementation and better control of future data entry.
Core Principle 4 – Good governance means taking informed, transparent decisions and managing risk
Report goes on to say that implementation of a truly cross departmental, cross-functional system will provide hugely improved access through simple, intuitive tools to better quality information for all stakeholders. The information provided will be used to underpin critical operational decisions for many years to come and it is essential that this data is robust, credible and readily available.
However, none of this is any good if you don’t have the people, not only to extract the data but to analyse it. It’s a bit like having the latest ipad but only being able to surf the internet and look at emails. What’s the point in having a top of the range IT system costing £8m, if you can’t make best use of it? That’s not value for money.
Neither are we are leveraging the information we should be able to extract from fit for purpose Income Tax and Social Insurance systems. I would therefore urge Policy Council to consider the need for adequate resources if we are not t