Part of 2. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 3:01 pm on 15 June 2016.
I thank the Member for the question. It highlights the fact that there are UK-wide pressures, and we’re taking different approaches to them. In England, they’ve taken an approach that has reduced funding into adult social care. We spend 7 per cent higher on health and social services per head, or £172, more in Wales than in England. We’ve also taken a different approach because of the way our health and social care services are organised. We don’t have the competitive and at times antagonistic relationship between providers in England, for example. That means that we’ve been able to take a system-wide approach to delayed transfers of care, working with a care system that has not been denuded of funds, and actually the morale of staff in England is particularly difficult. That’s why we’ve seen a fall over the last couple of months in delayed transfers here in Wales, which are at a record high in England since figures actually began. So, there are real lessons of what we’re doing here in Wales, and the positive points about that, but there’s no complacency here, because what we have done is to manage what we need to do and to understand more about what we do so that people don’t have a poor experience of going into the unscheduled care system, and equally they move into an appropriate place within the care system that meets their needs and understands what we could and should do to support them to maintain as much independence as possible. Much of that is how we prevent people from going into a hospital in the first place.