Part of 2. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 2:30 pm on 4 October 2017.
I thank you for that question. Developing the workforce and providing public assurance are two of my personal key priorities, but they’re also priorities of Social Care Wales, which, as you’ll be aware, came into existence in April of this year. And those two issues, I think, are very much front and centre as well of their strategic plan for the next five years. And they’re very much focused on what qualifications we’ll be asking people working in the sector to have in future. There’s a consultation ongoing at the moment, or I think it’s just been launched this week or next, in terms of what qualifications we’ll be asking people in the domiciliary care sector to be having in future, because we want to have qualifications when people are registered that are relevant, and that will give the public confidence, but also we need to make sure that we maintain those soft skills, which we have so much of in the domiciliary care sector as well. People have been working in that sector for many, many years, and they have experience and they’re compassionate. They deliver good quality care; they understand the individuals. Those things are quite hard to measure, so we need to have that balance in terms of the softer skills and the attitudes and the aptitudes for the work, as well as the more formal qualifications, as we seek to professionalise the workforce in order to make the work more attractive to people in future and to give the kind of kudos and respect and career structure that we would like to see in the workforce as well.