5. Will the Cabinet Secretary make a statement on the transfer of NHS patients to the most appropriate care setting? OAQ51906

Yes. Effective collaboration between our NHS, local authorities and their partners is critical to achieving the transition of patients to settings that best meet their own ongoing care needs. The Welsh Government has issued guidance on managing that important process and recent trends suggest it is having a positive effect.    

Thank you, Minister. I recently visited a small, independent care home in my constituency, and the owner left me in no doubt about the importance of co-operation between local government, local health boards and others to ensure that all patients receive the care that they need. He also highlighted how the process of transferring a patient to a different care setting can impact on the patient and their families, causing additional stress at what is already a worrying time. The integrated care fund encourages partnership working between those supporting people due to be discharged from care and people at risk of unnecessary admission to hospital or residential care homes. With the former Minister Rebecca Evans, I visited a great example in my own constituency, in Malpas, the Parklands. Can the Minister set out how we can utilise the fund creatively to ensure that patients are in the most appropriate care setting for their needs?

Yes, and it's a critical point. In some ways, the intermediate care fund and the use of it to enable effective not only discharge, but to ease that transition to the right care setting for the individual, whether that's in their home with the wraparound care that they need to support independent living or, actually, to a care home itself and, again, with the appropriate support as well, is critical. The ICF fund has done so much on this, not only in the Gwent area, but also where it's enabled teams that I visited in Ysbyty Maelor, in Caerphilly, in the Vale of Glamorgan and elsewhere, who actually use the ICF funding and the flexibility it gives to ease that transition, to make the right choices. And it is, of course, fundamentally focused on collaborative working, not only between the local authority and our NHS, but also third sector partners on the ground—those people who really can react to the needs of the individual.

So, within the Gwent area itself, we have, for example, within the £60 million overall envelope of the ICF this year, £9 million allocated within the Gwent region. 'Taking Wales Forward', of course, committed to retaining this fund, because we can see that, in some ways, this presages where we should be going with health and social care and in terms of the parliamentary review that the Cabinet Secretary referred to: collaborative working, making the money go further, but delivering better outcomes. And we're seeing this more and more now, right across Wales.

Cabinet Secretary, figures for the last year show that patients delayed on acute, community rehabilitation and other wards faced shorter delays in accessing the next stage of care than those delayed on mental health wards. Indeed, almost 80 per cent of patients delayed over 26 weeks are on mental health wards. What is the Welsh Government doing to tackle the problem of delayed transfers of care for mental health patients in Wales, please?

Yes, indeed, absolutely. Delayed transfers of care are at the centre of this—managing this transition effectively. And, of course, the right care that I was referring to earlier includes the right mental health care as well, and treatment, in the right setting as well. The good news is that this is not flicking a switch and we've suddenly removed delayed transfers of care overnight to the appropriate setting, but the work that we have been doing has been having real progress. So, I can tell the Member in response to his question that the total number of delayed transfers last year, in 2017, was 750—that's 750 too many, but it's 13 per cent lower than it was the previous year, and it's the lowest full year recorded in the 12 years for which delayed transfers of care statistics have been collected. The all-Wales total of delayed transfers of care in the January 2018 census was 442. Now, we acknowledge that this was slightly up—it was 4 per cent up in comparison with December of the previous year—but it was still, despite those massive pressures we've had this year, the third lowest January in the 12 years we've collected data. So, we're clearly doing something right, but if the Member is happy I think I'll write to him with some detail on specifically what we're doing on mental health as well to clarify, as part of that approach, where we're dealing with making sure it's the right transition for those who also have mental health needs as well.FootnoteLink

Information further to Plenary