6. 5. Statement: ‘Together for Mental Health’

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:04 pm on 11 October 2016.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 4:04, 11 October 2016

Thank you for the three questions. I’ll be happy to respond. I’ll take first your question about carers. In fact, of course, we talk about carers throughout the range of our different strategies and not just in this one too. They’re specifically mentioned in part of priority area 4, but that isn’t the only one of the 10 priority areas where carers are relevant. I would reference back to the fact that carers now have a statutory right to have their care and support needs assessed and met under the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014. So, it isn’t just about seeing the strategy on its own and saying that carers aren’t mentioned enough, because we recognise that, throughout this, to treat the individual service user with dignity and respect, you also need to understand the context in which that care is being provided. The family and friends who are providing that informal or formalised care around them are part of that. So, their care and support needs are also part of what we need to take into account. So, I think that’s part of where we see this. It isn’t that carers have been forgotten—far from it.

I’ll deal with the point you make about suicide, because, of course, we launched the second phase of ‘Talk to me 2: Suicide and Self Harm Prevention Strategy for Wales 2015-2020’ in July 2015, and it’s taking a more targeted approach than the previous strategy. So, in particular, we’re looking to identify particular groups of vulnerable people. So, for someone who isn’t attending appointments, there are risk points there that are actually raised. The challenge is someone who really isn’t known to the services—it’s really difficult. That’s really difficult to prevent. The challenge here is understanding those people who really are potentially vulnerable, who should be a higher priority and how to help to support those. That is explicitly part of the ‘Talk to me 2’ strategy. I was very pleased, yesterday, to have an opportunity to discuss that with Samaritans Wales, when I spoke at the launch of their impact report in Wales. There’s a really positive flow of work and we’re actually seeing suicides reducing in Wales, which is not a trend we’re seeing in every other part of the UK. But there’s no complacency about where we are and it’s why we’ve got a specific strategy in this area to be more proactive in understanding who is at risk.

Finally, on your point about staff, there’s a fair point here about recognising who we need for the workforce of the future to actually achieve the objectives that we have, and a vision that I think people around this Chamber would buy into. It’s then about how we deliver it. But while I have discussed and set out the range of cash that we spend and the additional investment that we’ve made, the greatest call on that resource is actually wages. It’s money—and it’s staff that that money is procuring. So, when you see the step forward made in the NHS Wales veteran service, that’s because we’ve actually got more staff to provide the service and that’s why waiting times are significantly better than other parts of the UK that have a similar service. When we talk about CAMHS, almost all of that is going into staff, and that’s where we’re finally seeing waiting times reduced, because we’ve got the staff resource in place who are actually addressing the challenges within the service.