Through the partnership, health boards and trusts work together with the NHS Wales Executive, Welsh Government and other stakeholders to achieve national quality and safety priorities across the breadth of healthcare services to benefit people in Wales.

Originally founded in March 2022, the first phase of the Safe Care Partnership culminated with the Safe Care Collaborative.

The second phase of the partnership, launched in May 2025, has been co-designed with colleagues across NHS Wales, public contributors representing service users and the wider population, and other key stakeholders.

Partnership priorities

The Safe Care Partnership’s workstreams focus on key quality and safety improvement priorities that have been identified collectively by Health Boards and Trusts, the NHS Wales Executive and Welsh Government.

The partnership will evolve over time in line new quality and safety priorities as they emerge. Workstreams are grounded in quality management approaches, acknowledging that quality improvement approaches alone are unlikely to results in sustainable improvement.

The current areas of focus are as follows.

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Framework for Safe, Reliable and Effective Care (SREC) is a key focus across the Safe Care Partnership’s workstreams, providing key enablers for the success of the work within it.

The framework sets out the interconnected elements required to create an enabling environment for improvement, bringing together the strategic, clinical and operational concepts critical for achieving safe, reliable and effective care.

We are producing an SREC hub, which will provide a range of resources to aid understanding of the framework and guide teams to make progress across its elements.

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