Description of the goods or services required
With the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 (WFG Act), Wales became the first country in the world to legislate for delivering the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Act has been recognised by the World Health Organization as a leading piece of legislation for sustainable development (SD), and there is national and international interest in seeing how the aspirations of the WFG Act are realised through system-wide change.
The WFG Act defined SD as “the process of improving the economic, social, environmental and cultural well-being of Wales by taking action, in accordance with the SD principles, aimed at achieving the well-being goals.”
Included in the detail of the Act is a duty on public sector bodies to define their well-being objectives to support the realisation of the WFG Act, achieving these through applying the five SD principles (below) to implement their approach;
• Long term thinking
• Involvement
• Collaboration
• Integration
• Prevention
As a public body in Wales, Public Health Wales (PHW) is developing a novel, evidence-based approach to embedding the SD principles into practice across the organisation, drawing on Quality Improvement (QI) methods in combination with organisational change and organisational development techniques. Improvement methods have a number of characteristics that might make them valuable in driving forward system change. Specifically, they encourage:
• clear articulation or definition of what are we trying to accomplish
• the development of specific and measurable aims
• testing of approaches at a small scale
• deliberative learning from and improvement in an approach, before implementation in other areas
• robust understanding of how we will know if a change is an improvement
• definition of key factors for enabling change, thereby enabling transferability of learning
In September 2017, PHW will begin to implement this QI approach in four separate areas of business:
1. governance and board in PHW
2. two other areas (TBC) in PHW
3. a collaborating NHS Health Board
The PHW Health and Sustainability Hub is developing an evidence-based implementation framework or route map for the approach, including key actions and enablers for organisations to support embedding SD principles. The framework will be aimed at PHW and other organisations in Wales, to support system-wide implementation of the WFG Act. Given the international interest in developments in Wales, this framework will add to the international literature on implementation of SD worldwide, and will be of interest to national and international audiences focusing on translating SDGs related policy into practice.
To progress the work of the Health and Sustainability Hub in PHW, it is important that this is underpinned by a sound theoretical basis for action addressing:
• approaches to translating SD principles into practice
• enablers and barriers to the implementation of SD principles into practice
• learning from case studies across disciplines (for example public and private sector)
A preliminary review in this area has suggested that there is some existing guidance on the approaches and priority areas to consider when implementing SD principles with regard to reducing health inequalities; and some limited evidence of enablers and barriers to implementing sustainable development principles in practice. For example there have been publications on the required changes needed to fulfil the health component of the SDGs. Some of this evidence includes learning from case studies in Latin America on how SD interventions can be successful, for example through prevention, community participation, robust data collection / monitoring systems and a requirement for strong leadership.
With the above considerations in mind, PHW would like to commission an academic partner to:
1. complete a review of the key areas listed above. The review should provide a critique of methods which have been used across sectors to embed the SD principles and practice, and the transferable lessons to the implementation of the WFG Act (for example private, voluntary, health, education and so on) to embed the SD principles in practice. These will include (but are not limited to) organisational development, decision-making process tools, improvement methodologies (e.g. QI), alignment of incentives, and public sector reform (e.g. DevoManc). Some examples from the health sector include examining the sustainability of social prescribing in primary care in Scotland and applying QI methodologies to two health promotion initiatives (falls prevention and chronic disease self-management) in the US. The examples may be from other non-health disciplines, including areas addressing the wider determinants of health such as housing, education, and employment.
2. Perform a process evaluation on the PHW approach to the implementation of SD principles across the four areas of approach, so that the usefulness of this project can be determined.
NOTE: The authority is using eTenderwales to carry out this procurement process. To obtain further information record your interest on Sell2Wales at http://www.sell2wales.gov.wales/search/search_switch.aspx?ID=69650
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