<p>Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople</p>

Part of 2. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 2:38 pm on 5 October 2016.

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Photo of Angela Burns Angela Burns Conservative 2:38, 5 October 2016

First Minister—I keep calling you First Minister; this must be an indication. Cabinet Secretary, you said again just then about delivering what the people of Wales need. And, frankly, we don’t deliver what the people of Wales need on health, on mental health. How many of us here have always talked about child and adolescent mental health services? We know that there are an awful lot of problems in the whole mental health arena. We don’t have enough of the specialists, and we don’t spend enough money on getting the services to people. And it is important, because one in four of us will suffer some kind of mental health episode in our life, and that’s a staggeringly high number. So, in physical health, there is much recognition by your Government of comorbidity, but the same is just not—there’s not the same sort of view within mental health.

So, what I’d like to know, Cabinet Secretary is: in your soon to be announced mental health plan, how much can we expect in terms of capacity and demand, and an end to silo working? Because I think we sometimes forget, and I have had constituents who can reaffirm this to me again and again, that a person with dementia can also have cancer, a person with depression can have a physical condition, a child in a wheelchair can have eating disorders, but we tend to only pick the physical element to treat first and leave the mental health issue second. I would like to see an end to this silo working, so that we can get to people, the one in four of us who will have some kind of mental health condition at some point in our life, and get those services to us, and I fear that at the moment we’re simply not going down the right track.