Welcome to NHS Wales Architecture

This site serves as a repository for sharing NHS Wales architectural knowledge, decisions, and principles. It is maintained by Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW).

What You'll Find Here

Architecture Principles

Our Architecture Principles guide how we design and build systems across NHS Wales. These principles cover areas including:

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

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.

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

Design Authority

The DHCW Technical Design Authority (TDA) oversees architectural decisions and ensures alignment with NHS Wales's strategic objectives. You'll find:

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

Getting Started

New to ADRs? Read why we write architecture decision records and this practical overview of ADRs
Want to propose a new architecture decision? Follow our ADRProcess
Looking for guidance? Start with our Architecture Principles
Need to review past decisions? Browse our Categorised decisions

Contributing

This site is managed through our GitHub repository. We welcome contributions from the NHS Wales technology community. See our ADR process documentation for details on how to propose changes or new decisions.