Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:47 pm on 20 September 2016.
It’s a fair point about how we deal with Welsh as part of the importance of communication to deliver effective health and care. We know that for a range of people who have dementia, they often default to their first language and so it becomes more difficult to understand and communicate in other languages that they may have learned in life. So, there is a real imperative about the quality of healthcare—about how we have the healthcare team being able to deliver that. Some of that will be about how we help people to give them opportunities to learn Welsh once they come here, but it will also be about the wider team as well, because it doesn’t have to be the GPs themselves necessarily who have the Welsh language skills and ability. It’s got to be about the way that whole team works together where it is a genuine need, and to see it in that context. That then is something about how we recruit all of our professionals here in Wales and what that means in those different roles within that primary care team, not just in nursing but all the therapists as well, because sometimes when you understand what people want it’s in a slightly different context to when we actually then need the help, support and advice, ultimately, as well. So, it’s a genuinely joined-up approach; it recognises the language as a genuine issue, but at the same time it has to see it within that wider team context in which we want to provide excellence in care. Our first priority is to understand what we can do to attract more people to stay in Wales and to come to Wales to train, to work and to live. This is about how we enable people to do that, rather than creating a barrier that need not be there.