Wrexham Assembly Member, Lesley Griffiths has welcomed a £6million pound injection of funding for Invest-to-Save initiatives – a share of which will go to a communications upgrade for Wrexham public sector organisations.
The funding includes a £3million pot which will enable six North Wales organisations to link into a state-of-the-art broadband network. This will include Wrexham County Borough Council, Conwy and Flintshire Councils; North Wales Fire & Rescue and Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, which covers Wrexham Maelor Hospital.
Investment in the roll-out of the Public Sector Broadband Aggregation network will deliver voice, video and data communications across Wales. This will save 20% of the cost of these services and pay for itself. £2 million is also earmarked to roll this out across Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire, Bridgend and Cardiff.
Also of part of this round of funding, half a million pounds is belong made available for Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board to pilot digital speech recognition technology that will deliver 30% efficiency savings, speed up communications between hospital doctors and GPs and lead to improved patient services. This comes alongside £125k for web-based expenses solutions that will generate over £1.2million of savings for the NHS inside four years.
This Invest-to-Save initiative is funded by the Welsh Government, and invests funds so that public money will be saved in the medium-to-long term. This latest, fourth round of funding will be shared between a number of organisations to help them deliver first class and efficient public services.
Welsh Labour’s Minister for Finance Jane Hutt announced the funds, with further round of Invest-to-Save funding due later this summer.
Commenting on the news, Lesley Griffiths said:
“I am pleased to see this far sighted initiative being taken forwards by the Welsh Labour Government, in spite of the current financial circumstances.
“This investment will help to revolutionise the way NHS clinical staff communicate across North Wales and also bring Council communications technology to a first class standard.
“However, the best thing about the Invest-to-Save scheme is that it more than pays for itself – through the saving it creates.
“It is more than important now than ever we deliver savings in public services. This initiative does exactly, that whilst delivering improved services at the same time.”
