I thank you again for that question and you’re absolutely right in identifying that carers play a crucial role in supporting people with dementia. Our dementia vision in Wales is very much about supporting people with dementia to stay at home for as long as possible and to play a full part in the community. Obviously, carers have an absolutely key role to play in that. As you know, we’ll be refreshing our dementia vision. Again, this happens this year, and, on our task and finish group for that, we’ll have the Wales Carers Alliance, so they’ll play very much a key role in advising Government on our future provision for people with dementia and the role that carers can play.

I think it’s extremely important that health and social care are able to share data so that people don’t have to tell their story three times to three different professionals and go over the same data over and over again. So this is something that we’re trying to make some real progress on as well.

Many carers are dementia champions—they play an important role in our Welsh Government support through the Alzheimer’s Society for creating dementia-friendly communities with a view to creating a dementia-friendly Wales. We have 2,000 of those champions at the moment, making a real difference at a very local level, and it’s worth reflecting on my attendance recently at the British-Irish Council, where we had a special discussion on the role of carers particularly. Our administrations identified older carers and carers who support older people as a particular area on which we would like to focus across our administrations in terms of sharing best practice and working together to improve things for the carers and the cared for as well. So, I hope to have some progress made there as well.