Part of 3. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 3:14 pm on 1 March 2017.
You’re well blessed, Minister, in having this support in helping you make sure that the voice of social care is well represented in what’s likely to be happening over the next period of this Assembly, anyway. One of the things that you won’t find any opposition from anybody on, I suspect, in this Chamber, is the focus on the integration of health and social care, really focusing on primary and intermediate care levels. These, themselves, are NHS terms. They’re medical structures, and I think an explicit statement of intent to adopt a more social-focused model of integration would actually be pretty welcome in this Chamber. Medical intervention is, when you come to it, just part of social care. Emotional support and the place of human contact can be just as important, not least to carers, who themselves may not have any medical needs, of course. They’re at the heart of any future look at care—as, indeed, will be the nature of housing and the cross-pollination of skills in an integrated workforce. It’s going to need considerable and ongoing research to support good practice and policy development, so is this a job that you foresee, at some point, Social Care Wales taking over? Obviously it would complement their work in career design and development. And if not, why not?