What We Do

Our strategic priorities for 2021-2024

As the national professional leadership organisation for social services in Wales, our vision is to ensure that children and adults in need, experience well-being and achieve what matters to them by accessing the right care and support at the right time within their communities, and that we ensure vulnerable children and adults are safeguarded.
We believe in working in partnership with the wider social care and health sector to improve services, whilst maintaining the local autonomy, flexibility of approach and diversity of choice that supports people to have genuine voice and control regarding the services they want and how they want them delivered. We recognise in our priorities the need to continue to rebalance the sector to ensure delivery of choice for children and adults.

Our members know the people they serve more comprehensively than any other public service provider; and understand the intrinsic importance of social care across all ages and in every part of their community. We are keenly aware of the challenges to delivering effective, high quality and sustainable social care services in the years ahead. While these challenges have been amplified by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, a systemic transformation was always required to not only meet changing public aspirations regarding the future of care services but also to meet long-term governmental commitments to climate change. Therefore, we recognise that, more than ever, we must develop and adopt innovative and agile approaches to the commissioning and delivery of care and support services. These new models and approaches must be based on high-quality research and a robust evidence-base to allow us to move beyond just sector recovery but to truly respond to the changing needs of individuals, families, and communities right across Wales, now, and in the future.
We believe ADSS Cymru’s collective voice is critical to ensuring these needs continue to be at the heart of the seamless social care and health services envisioned by A Healthier Wales as well as ensuring that all agencies are held to account for their duties to provide care and support and that opportunities to improve outcomes can be fully realised.
Through our collective experience as professional leaders and practitioners, coupled with the evidence gathered by our organisation and our partners, we have identified four priority areas that we will focus on over the next three years, and work to promote and embody the values that underpin those priorities at a local, regional, and national level.
Recognising the landscape of social care is ever-changing, we have identified the broad activities that we will undertake during the next 12 months. We will develop specific action plans around those activities and then review our position and consider future activities in line with our priorities based on the emerging recovery landscape.

Read the full report