Well, Deputy Presiding Officer, it’s 2017 now, and depending on local needs and circumstances, community hospitals can play an important role in delivering a range of facilities and services, including respite. However, quality care is about more than just buildings and bed numbers. A number of very old and outdated community hospitals have closed in recent years, and I do recognise that these hospitals were much loved and much cherished by their local communities, but they were no longer able to provide care that’s appropriate to meet today’s modern standards. These hospitals are being replaced with new primary care resource centres, funded by Welsh Government, and are providing an increased range of services in a modern setting, resulting in people receiving more of the care and support they need close to home. There’s often criticism that these new centres do not have in-patient beds, but it’s often far more appropriate for people to receive care through enhanced services at home. In cases where an in-patient bed is deemed to be clinically required, these are being provided through nearby modern hospitals, so the emphasis has to be on the quality of the service and meeting people’s needs, rather than where that care is physically delivered.

A pipeline of primary and community care investment is being delivered as part of health boards’ estate priorities, and this is linked to the work that we want to see done to increase the scale and pace of service shift into primary and community care settings. Some early opportunities for investment have already been identified in the NHS-owned estate as the longer-term investment programme is developed. We have approved nearly £5 million of capital funding for a number of priority schemes, and opportunities for further capital investment in 2017-18 and beyond are being discussed with health board teams as service planning work develops, and in line with their integrated medium-term plans.

We are now seeing the benefits of this approach. We saw a further fall in our delayed transfer of care figures for December, and I expect my confidence to be rewarded by a further reduction when the January figures are published shortly. I want to reassure Rhun ap Iorwerth that we’re not complacent, though, and it might be interesting for Members to know that the major cause of delayed transfers of care is actually patient choice, rather than a lack of numbers of beds. So, the situation is perhaps more complicated than it first seems.

Turning to the second amendment, tabled in the name of Paul Davies, we agree that allied healthcare professionals play a vital role in reducing avoidable demand for social care by actively working in the community and primary care. Through multi-professional teams, they’re delivering preventative care and admission avoidance, reshaping the way patients are supported to live their lives and better manage their conditions. So, we support this amendment.

And, interestingly, having considered the comments raised by Rhun ap Iorwerth on the issue of aids and adaptations with me in questions last week, I did discuss this with front-line professionals, who told me that there isn’t a major backlog in terms of aids and adaptations, and decreasing numbers may well actually be the result of the success of our Welsh Government housing standards, which are making homes more appropriate for people to live in in later ages, and also our focus on prevention is working. So, whilst it’s really good to be interested in outputs, it’s even better to be interested in outcomes.

I’m glad that Sian Gwenllian is looking into the case that she described, and, if she’d like to write to me, I’d be more than happy to also look into that case. Obviously, Members will realise that intermediate care fund money is actually being used in the field of aids and adaptations as well.

So, there’s no doubt that our health and social care services are facing challenges, but we are meeting these challenges head on, and have already increased resilience by taking a whole-system approach to planning and service delivery. We’ll continue to work with our partners and support them in working together to deliver integration and collaboration.