Part of 3. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 2:44 pm on 19 July 2017.
I thank the Member for the question. In the general sense, about the backstop and the ability to think about whether we’re delivering change and making sure it’s going in broadly the right direction, that’s why there’s an NHS collaborative, bringing chief execs together to discuss and review evidence for changes that are proposed. That’s why we have integrated medium-term plans to try and set up the direction of travel for each health board—to have a plan, moving forward, about the changes that are being contemplated and delivered. It’s why health boards themselves [Inaudible.] they have processes that return a capital investment as well. There has to be a business case, and then there’s an investment board that looks at all-Wales capital bids, so, where capital is being used to try and re-engineer a service.
There are different layers of oversight about some of the plans and challenges over service reformation. In the particular area you raise about children and young people, I would not be quite so pessimistic about the need for a total overhaul. There are challenges in different parts of the country, of differing scale, but that’s part of the reason why, in recognising, if you like, the short-term, significant build-up of pressure that came in, we made the choices to start the Together for Children and Young People exercise with the NHS, working with the third sector, working with statutory partners, and, indeed, with young people themselves having an engagement in it, and it’s then about delivering a service model they recommend. That’s also why we invested the additional sums of money. We are seeing waiting times come down in this particular service area, and we are seeing faster access to therapies, backed up, of course, by tougher standards on waiting times in this area. But this is not a position where any of us should say we now have the perfect solution and the answer.
The progress we’ve made is real. The reality is that it’s also real that there are still too many children and young people and their families who wait too long, and it’s a constant process of reviewing where we are and what we need to do next, and that is already delivering transformative change within our service. But it isn’t just the specialist end; it is about the wider, broader services that wrap around families, and you’re right that it is about the consistency of the ability to do that. That’s why being reflective, having a national mechanism as well as a local mechanism to do so, really matters, and it’s also why we take the third sector and the voices of children and young people themselves seriously in designing and delivering our services.