Thank you for calling me to speak on this very important report. I'm a member of the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee and I think this is one of the most important reports that we have produced.

I'm sure like many others in this Chamber, on Saturday I celebrated the NHS's seventieth birthday in my constituency with a stall and a birthday card for the NHS in Whitchurch in Cardiff North. It was a fantastic experience, because people were queuing up to sign, they were so enthusiastic about the NHS, people were telling me that their lives had been saved on three occasions, and other people talked about working in the NHS for 40 years, and it was a really stimulating morning. There were so many stories of care that it was wonderful, but the whole of that time in the morning, we didn't hear any of the stories about elderly people in care homes, or elderly people cared for by the NHS, and I think that is one of the key points—that those people can't tell us their stories, which is why this report is so important. We need to speak out for them, because they can't speak out for themselves. We do need to hear patients' voices and we do need to work out what are the care needs of people who are in our care.

I think that Lynne, when she was speaking, mentioned 'challenging behaviour' as a means of describing how people behave, and, again, I feel a reluctance to use that sort of way of speaking. But the important thing is to find out what are the real needs of people, the person-centred approach, and not to prescribe medicine that just effectively sedates them. We did hear some disturbing inquiries and the one that sticks in my head is the man in the care home who was constantly banging his head against a glass door. Instead of seeking a prescription for antipsychotic drugs, a carer worked out that why he was banging his head on the door was because he could see the door of a greenhouse that he wanted to go out to, because he'd been a gardener, and gardening had been his hobby all his life. He felt that this place would be a safe haven. That's an example that sticks with me in terms of how we've got to look at the person and not just take what may be an easy solution.

I wanted to talk now a bit about the recommendations from the committee and the Government's response. I was going to start with recommendation 3, which is really to reinforce what the Chair said when he made his introduction, because we did recommend that there should be developed a standardised checklist tool to be used by health and social care staff to identify the cause of challenging behaviour.

Quite a bit has already been said about the 'accept in principle' expression and how that is something that I hope we might move away from, but I know that, in the response, the Government says,

'developing one standardised checklist tool is not considered to be appropriate.'

I cannot really understand that reason for not developing a standardised tool, because recommendation 6 is accepted, where it says that

'medicines monitoring should be a key part of care homes inspection, and that Care Inspectorate Wales mandates documented evidence'.

So, I can't see why you can't have a standard tool that would be used for every care home, every setting where a person has been. It would give the staff the tools to check out every eventuality and make sure they weren't prescribing something when there was another reason for it, such as toothache, or problems with vision—you know, lots of things that are causing distress.

The Chair referred to the evidence we had from Professor Sue Jordan of Swansea University college of human and health sciences, who has developed the adverse drug reaction profile tool that has actually been tested and has been shown to reduce considerably the amount of antipsychotic medicines that have actually been used. It's been peer reviewed and has been very successful. I think that there's no point in reinventing the wheel; we know that there are toolkits that have been developed, such as the one by Professor Sue Jordan, and I think that it would make absolute sense to develop this toolkit to be used as a matter of routine in every care home, in every setting where an elderly person is being looked after. So, it's a matter of routine, the work has been done, we know about Professor Sue Jordan's work and other work that was presented to us, and I think that would be a clear way ahead for the Welsh Government.