Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:32 pm on 10 January 2017.
Well, I’m not sure if the first point about someone who hadn’t spoken for years actually standing up and speaking when you were singing was a comment on your singing ability, or whether it’s about the impact of music on memory and triggering a reaction. But those points are well made about different activities that are not just about experience, but how you maintain someone’s ability to do things as well and making sure they don’t deteriorate at a more rapid rate.
I understand the points that are regularly made about the way that we consult, but this is a good example of listening to and working with not just the third sector and advocates and champions in designing and delivering a consultation to go out to a broader group of people, but individuals themselves, as I’ve said, because in the dementia engagement and empowerment project, those people are living with dementia themselves, and so they play a key part in terms of people who we’ve listened to in drawing up these proposals for consultation. And it’s why I’m encouraging, and other people are encouraging, the widest possible range of people to get involved and engaged. The events that we’re running we are running with the third sector, with a range of different people they’ve already worked with, who they know have this challenge now, and other people who will get diagnosed in the future as well. We won’t ever, being honest, reach 100 per cent of people. No consultation can do that. But I do think we’re going to reach a good number of people who will then tell us something of real value about their lives, how they live them, the challenges they’ve faced already, what’s worked for them, and what hasn’t, to understand what we already do now, and what we want to do better in the future to deliver better outcomes for those individuals and their families.
That goes back to your final point about merging departments between social services and/or the NHS. We’ve set out a clear agenda in the social services and well-being Act on the partnership that we expect to see happen between health and social care, and the wider third sector and individuals as well. It is about how you empower people. It is about how you reduce barriers to design services around individuals. The Minister will be doing more work on this in practical terms, working with a range of different partners, to understand how the scheme of that Act is progressively delivered over the next couple of years. And I think we’ll be in a good place later on in this term to see how successful we’ve been. We’ve made a deliberate choice not to have a structural reorganisation, but to think about we actually get outcomes for people, and that sense of partnership and real engagement, and mandating people to work together in health and social care in particular.