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Welcome to NHS Wales Architecture

This site is a shared home for NHS Wales architectural knowledge, decisions, and principles. It is maintained by Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW).

NHS Wales and Organisation-Specific Content

Content on this site is organised into two levels, reflected throughout the navigation:

  • NHS Wales - National content, approved by the NHS Wales Standards and Architecture Group (SAG), for adoption across all of NHS Wales.
  • Organisation - Local content maintained by an individual NHS Wales organisation, including its own rationale, implications, and governance. Today, this is limited to DHCW; almost everything on this site currently falls under this DHCW-specific level.

What You'll Find Here

Architecture Principles

Our Architecture Principles guide how we design and build systems across NHS Wales. The foundational principles are approved nationally by SAG; DHCW then adopts them, adding its own rationale and implications, and supplements them with DHCW-specific principles covering areas including:

  • User-Centred Design
  • Security and Identity
  • Cloud and Infrastructure
  • Digital Products and Software Engineering
  • Data and Analytics
  • Open Architecture

Design Authority

The NHS Wales Standards and Architecture Group (SAG) is the national body with authority to approve architecture principles, standards, and decisions for use across NHS Wales.

The DHCW Technical Design Authority (TDA) adopts SAG's national principles and oversees DHCW's own architectural decisions, ensuring alignment with DHCW's and wider NHS Wales's strategic objectives. You'll find:

  • Our ADR process and templates
  • Terms of reference
  • Meeting records and decisions
  • Enterprise architecture metamodel

Architecture Decisions

We use Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) to document important architectural choices, including their context, consequences, and rationale. This documentation helps teams understand not just what was decided, but why those decisions were made. Decisions published here are currently DHCW-specific.

Our decisions are organised into three categories:

  • Meta Decisions: Decisions about our ADR process itself, documentation standards, and tooling
  • Process Decisions: Decisions about how we work, including security processes, development workflows, and operational procedures
  • Technical Decisions: Technology choices, system architectures, integration patterns, and infrastructure decisions

Getting Started

  1. New to ADRs? Read why we write architecture decision records and this practical overview of ADRs

  2. Want to propose a new architecture decision? Follow our ADRProcess

  3. Looking for guidance? Start with our Architecture Principles

  4. Need to review past decisions? Browse our Categorised decisions

Contributing

This site is managed through our internal GitHub repository. We welcome contributions from the NHS Wales technology community.

Feel free to raise an Issue to start a discussion.

See also our ADR process documentation for details on how to propose or contribute new decisions.

Public and Internal Repositories

Note that DHCW maintains both an internal repository for development and a public read-only repository for the published site. Consult the README for more details.