Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:12 pm on 14 March 2018.
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.