Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:38 pm on 19 September 2018.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 2:38, 19 September 2018

I shall remind you of your recognition that we have to accept some projects won't succeed, if that happens. But, look, the cultural change point you make is one that I accept completely. But the transformation fund particularly will help to kick-start new models of care. That will be part of generating cultural change, but it won't do it in itself. If I said the transformation fund was the thing that would generate the cultural change we want to see then I'd be setting that fund up to fail from the outset, because actually it's about much more. If you go back to not just the review but to 'A Healthier Wales' itself, and then accepting the four main pillars of it, a large part of that is about the engagement of the staff in helping to re-engineer and redesign the service. That isn't just a discrete group of managers, leaders and planners. It is about a wider group of staff buying into how they are the most effective agents for change for the service. It's a message that I've regularly given in going out and meeting with staff and listening to them, saying that, actually, they're in a really privileged position, because they're trusted by the public in a way that no politician in this place will be, and they have the opportunity to change the system from their own experience and their own view on where there is waste and inefficiency and opportunity for improvement. Getting right the cultural change is something that they'll understand when we have it, but it's rather more difficult to measure. If we can't, though, generate that cultural change, we won't deliver the sort of shift that I think everyone, regardless of their party in this place, wants to see across our health and social care system.