Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:20 pm on 11 October 2016.
Thank you for the series of comments and questions. I'll just stick to dealing with the questions. Your question about psychological therapies—I indicated in my statement and partially in answer to Rhun ap Iorwerth and his series of questions, of course, that the money we’re talking about is going to be largely invested in staff to provide the therapies, and that's the point about how we want to see improvement in the quality of care and in waiting times themselves as well. We know there’s a need for expanded capacity. And at the same time, though, not just by expanding the capacity we have, we need to look—and this is part of the question in CAMHS as well—and also make sure that the right pathway exists so that people who don't need that specialist care have an appropriate form of care in another part of the system, so that means that people who really do need access to specialist therapeutic support can and will receive it. It's also why we've changed our waiting time standards. Our waiting times standards are now tougher than in other parts of the UK. We’ve halved the time it takes to get to actually see someone to have an assessment, and then the time it takes to actually start a therapeutic intervention as well. So, we're actually moving to have a more demanding system, recognising that access to therapy when somebody needs it is often more important and, actually, you often get a better result the earlier that access is provided, which is why we are making the significant investment that I've already outlined.
On out-of-area placements for children, we're very clear we've got an ambition to see the number of placements—not just for children, but also for adults, too, but you asked specifically about children—improve, so we need to make less use of these residential placements for children. We want to see more and more of that care provided in a local setting, in a community setting, and, often, the outcomes will be better. It's really if someone has very particular high-level needs that they would need an out-of-area placement, and that’ll be part of the work we need to do, to understand who really needs to have that placement and then to make sure an appropriate place is available for them. And sometimes that may not be in Wales—that may be the right thing for that person to do, but that is not the preferred option that we've set out or that services recognise they would want to have.
On your points about the well-being bond and social prescribing, the Minister for public health and I will provide Members with more details as we’ve more data to provide you, and in particular, on the well-being bond, what that could look like, what it will mean for communities, and, on social prescribing, too, it goes across both of our responsibilities, because there is a lot to this that is about public health and how we get people active and engaged and recognising that a lot of this is about a person's general sense of well-being, and social prescribing can help that and really help physical health outcomes, too.
There is real interest in this from the GP community right across Wales, and Dr Richard Lewis, once of the BMA, who is now the national clinical lead for primary care, is leading a piece of work on this, and I'm really optimistic about not just people buying into the idea, but then buying into a, hopefully, more simplified way to understand what social prescribing is and how to make that real for individual citizens and GPs themselves.
And, finally, on Time to Change Wales, it enjoys cross-party support. We’ve continued to fund it. We'll review the delivery of Time to Change Wales, what we've achieved, and we’ll then look at what we do next, because the campaign to end stigma and discrimination against people with mental health—we've made real strides on a cross-basis in Wales that we can be proud of, but no-one should pretend that this is completed. There’s still more for us to do, so we'll continue to need to engage with both the third sector and the wider public about what we still need to do to change the narrative on mental health that is a normal part of everyday life.