8. 4. Statement: The Parliamentary Review into Health and Care Services

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:40 pm on 1 November 2016.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 4:40, 1 November 2016

I thank the Member for the questions and comments. Again, this is an item that comes from agreement between the two parties—that another party in this Chamber has joined constructively with us to have what I hope is a unified position to start from. Then we’ll all have challenges to face when the review delivers its recommendations. There is no avoiding the fact there are very real challenges for politicians in every party about how we’re not just going to have a mature conversation now, but maturity in our conversations in the future, when we’ll all have difficult choices to make about what we wish to see and how we’ll actually make those choices a reality.

Now, turning to your, I think, three broad points, obviously, in terms of the terms that we’ve agreed between parties, we have an agreed starting point, but I agree it will be sensible to get a view from the panel themselves about the breadth of the terms that we’ve provided to them and to make sure that the terms are tight enough, because I’m really keen, as you’ll know from our previous discussions, to make sure we don’t have a long, freewheeling inquiry that takes years and years and years. I want something that is going to be useful and workable for us to give us some answers about the future within this term and the next one.

That’s also why we haven’t introduced a new NHS strategy. ‘Together for Health’ hasn’t been succeeded by a successor strategy now, because we’re going to have this review, and it would not make sense, as I said, I think, here in this Chamber and at our meetings, to simply say that I will introduce a new NHS strategy and then have the review as well. The review has to have meaning, and that does also mean that the remit has to be tight enough to be able to be delivered within that calendar year period. If there’s a small bit of slippage, that’s one thing, but I really, really don’t think it’s in anyone’s interests for this review to run over several years.

On the patient view and the patient perspective, again, these are things we’ve had some discussions about previously. So, just as with the IPFR review, we’ve managed to find a way to make sure that the patient perspective is real and directly taken account of in the review. I would expect that we would have to agree and find a similar mechanism as well. I would expect that not just for the call for evidence, because just in that broad call for evidence, we can expect people who are advantaged and part of organisations to take part, but to make sure that we have a facilitated patient perspective of people’s experience—not just a patient perspective, but a citizen perspective, across health and care. So, that is definitely something in our minds that we want to make sure that the review panel themselves can directly consider.

That then goes into your final point, both about innovation and also a fresh view of the future. We expect the panel to give us an idea of some of those challenges for the future. We have a number of well-rehearsed challenges that we face already. This is about looking at where we are now and where we could be in the future, and options to get there, about how we confront and deal with those challenges already. So, that is health and care together—the integration within healthcare between primary and secondary care, the integration between different groups of professionals, the integration between health and social care and other parts of public and private sectors, as well. So, this is about seeing the citizen within the service and what we need to do to have real choices to make about the future of our services. Because we can’t get away from the reality: there is a reducing financial sum available to us to run public services here in Wales. There are difficult choices available to us, but we still have choices to make, and this review should help us to make those choices and provide real challenge, I think, for politicians, whether in the governing party, or in opposition parties, about what those choices could be and what we’re then prepared to do.

I hope that helpfully deals with the points you made. We’ll carry on talking, of course, throughout the period of the review’s work and then final report and recommendations.