The mental health landscape in Wales

Overview of organisations involved in mental health in Wales

Despite Wales being a relatively small country, it has several government organisations that are involved in mental health services and mental health data.

Seven local health boards are responsible for planning and delivering primary, community and secondary care services alongside specialist services for their areas. These include mental health services. The health boards are also responsible for improving physical and mental health outcomes, promoting wellbeing and reducing health inequalities in the population across their respective areas. The health boards collect data on the services they provide, which then feed into official statistics.

There are also three NHS trusts, which cover the whole population of Wales: Public Health Wales NHS Trust, Velindre University NHS Trust and Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust. Of relevance to mental health, Public Health Wales works to protect and improve health and wellbeing and to reduce health inequalities among people in Wales.

Additionally, there are two special health authorities in Wales:

• Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW), which is part of NHS Wales. It works in partnership with NHS Wales colleagues and other key stakeholders to provide national digital and data systems and services which support the delivery of health and social care in Wales. It also collects and analyses health service data across Wales. DHCW is responsible for the development and implementation of an all-Wales electronic record to help improve mental health planning and provision in Wales.
• Health Education and Improvement Wales (HEIW) is the strategic workforce body for NHS Wales. It has a leading role in the education, training, development and shaping of the healthcare workforce across Wales. It is also responsible for the Strategic mental health workforce plan for health and social care, the ambition of which is to deliver a motivated, engaged and valued health and social care workforce.

A further organisation, NHS Wales Performance and Improvement, previously NHS Wales Executive, focuses on enhancing care quality and safety. Its Performance and Assurance directorate oversees mental health and learning disabilities by leading assurance reviews to improve service quality and consistency. It also manages the Strategic Programme for Mental Health, which seeks to improve safety and outcomes by reducing unwarranted variation and promoting equity between physical and mental health services.

The NHS Wales Joint Commissioning Committee (NWJCC) is a joint committee of the seven health boards acting collectively on their behalf. One of the roles of NWJCC is to commission a range of services related to mental health across Wales. It also oversees the commissioning of the ‘NHS 111 press 2’ service, which allows people to call 111 and press option 2 to connect directly with a mental health worker in their area.

Policy context

The Welsh Government has published two new strategies related to mental health in 2025: the Suicide prevention and self-harm: strategy and delivery plan, published on 1 April, and the Mental health and wellbeing strategy: strategy (2025-2035) and associated delivery plan (2025-2028), published on 30 April.

The ‘Mental health and wellbeing strategy’ contains a commitment to publishing a mental health data and digital delivery plan and, as part of this, developing a mental health core dataset. It acknowledges that this is a complex piece of work, but states that the aim is to ensure that the data collected are robust and fit for purpose.

The three-year delivery plan that accompanies the strategy includes an action to “Provide a clear plan for digital and data for mental health services that supports the delivery of the strategy.” Within this action, the delivery plan commits to the following:

“Development of digital and data overarching plan and a two-year detailed implementation plan. This detailed implementation plan will include:

• Mandate a mental health core dataset for services.
• Put in place and report on clear outcomes and experience measures across all services.
• Introduce an electronic patient record across Wales.”

The planned development of the core mental health dataset is discussed in more detail later in this report.

Mental health data and statistics in Wales

Most of the official statistics on mental health and mental wellbeing in Wales are published by the Welsh Government. These statistics cover ‘core’ topics related to mental health services, such as public health and primary and secondary care services, as well as wider topics, such as education and maternity. To help users understand the official statistics landscape, the Welsh Government published a document in 2021 that provides a summary of the mental health data sources that it uses. This summary includes background information on the data sources, what data are available, how frequently the data are released, and web links for further information.

In 2024, the Welsh Government published a mental health dashboard that brings together all the published mental health data and statistics from a wide variety of data sources into one place. Information is available under the broad headings of public health, primary care, secondary care, education and finance. The Welsh Government told us that web analytics data indicate that the dashboard has been very popular among users.

In addition, statistical releases on suicides in England and Wales are published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Public Health Wales also publishes statistics on real-time suspected suicide surveillance. These statistics are currently published as official statistics in development. Digital Health and Care Wales’s hospital admissions tables include admissions for individuals with certain mental health conditions.

Public Health Wales also publishes data on the School Health Research Network’s (SHRN) Secondary School Children’s Health and Wellbeing Dashboard. Although these data are not published as official statistics, Public Health Wales follows the Code of Practice for Statistics when producing the dashboards.

Other organisations, besides those responsible for official statistics, also produce data related to mental health. For example, the NHS Wales Joint Commissioning Committee (NWJCC) publishes a dashboard on the ‘NHS 111 Wales Press 2: Mental Health Support’ service. The dashboard contains information on the number of contacts with the service overall, which is also broken down by age, gender, hour and day of the week, health board and local authority. However, much more detailed information is available for internal use than is published externally. Colleagues within NWJCC noted that barriers to making more data available externally mostly related to quality issues and concerns around confidentiality and disclosure.