Community Health Councils

Part of 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 3:02 pm on 31 January 2018.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 3:02, 31 January 2018

As I've said, we are gathering together the consultation responses, and we do continue to have a very constructive dialogue about how to take forward proposals, but I think all of us want to see a new citizen-voiced body that is able to properly cover the fields of health and social care, and you can't do that without replacing CHCs, because their current remit set out in primary legislation just doesn't stretch into the social care field. So, that's really important for us to achieve. Actually, there are some people who take your view that a national body shouldn't be the answer, but actually we already have a national body with the CHC board. It's about making it work and ensuring that we can deal with some of the concerns that people do have about a national body being set up in one remote location—whether it's Cardiff, Aberystwyth or Bangor—and that wouldn't then have the local status and the local organisation to have a presence within local communities. So, those concerns are being taken seriously, and as we both have the consultation responses and we've moved forward to then having what I hope will be proposals for a Bill, these are obviously matters that will want to set out in detail, how we propose to deal with those, but those conversations are not complete.