I thank you very much for that question and the recognition of the huge range of assistive technologies that there are, and the sheer potential of them in terms of improving the care that we offer people. There are already established funding mechanisms in place and established approaches with regard to the adoption and expansion of the use of assistive technologies. For example, our digital health and care strategy for Wales provides a road map for encouraging the greater use of technology to transform our health and social care services and achieve better outcomes for people. And our technology-enabled care programme is also developing a national approach to scaling up the use of telehealth and telecare in Wales, and that programme works really closely with health and social care colleagues within Welsh Government to identify the priorities and the most effective and consistent uses that we could put these new technologies to.

In terms of funding, we already have an efficiency through technology programme, and that’s a £10 million fund to support the assessment and rapid development and adoption of new technologies across health and social care. And also, of course, our integrated care fund offers huge opportunities to use these new technologies to keep people at home, rather than having unnecessary admissions to hospital, and obviously to bring people home more quickly from hospital as well. We’ve made £60 million of funding available across Wales for the ICF in this year, and there are some examples in our area of Western Bay where this funding has been used. For example, the region has just received funding for the purchase of Just Checking assistive technology kits, and they’ll be used in homes for supported living tenancies for people with learning disabilities. And so the service will use these kits to measure the support that individuals will require in their initial setting-up period, and then they can use these kits to target hours of support, both during the day and the night, at the correct level for the individual concerned.