5. Statement by the Minister for Children, Older People and Social Care: In celebration of Older People's Day

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:50 pm on 2 October 2018.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Huw Irranca-Davies Huw Irranca-Davies Labour 4:50, 2 October 2018

Unfortunately, in a statement, I can't. But I think you'll continue to make your case for a focus on home, and I'll continue to make the case for, 'We should do these good things at home and overseas as well.'

But let me pick up on some of the points where I think we had real agreement there. You mentioned about the transformation—how do we take these good examples like the Prince Philip? I think I mentioned in my earlier contribution that the Prince Philip example and many others that I see as I travel around Wales—it's not an isolated example any more—are driven by ICF funding, and sometimes driven, I have to say, by health boards and local authorities without ICF funding doing it themselves. Sometimes those, through their regional partnership working now, have decided to roll that out. If you look, for example, at the Cwm Taf stay well at home, without a lot of additional funding, they've rolled that across large areas, but not entirely. So, we hope that the transformation programme we have, backed with £100 million of funding, will allow these to be upscaled to regional level and then replicated as well. So, what is great and novel becomes commonplace and mainstreamed. But, of course, the ICF funding of £80 million this year, and the transformation fund of £100 million over the next two years or so, are as nothing compared to the £9 billion within the combined health and social care budget. So, if we can actually get this stuff mainstreamed into that budget, into the way of thinking, then we've really broken the back of this. And I start to see—the Cabinet Secretary for health and I, who jointly go on endless tours of the country speaking to the regional partnership boards—we absolutely see now that they are owning this process themselves increasingly and are coming to us saying, 'Here's what we think we can do, not just with additional funding, but as part of core funding, because that will make the difference for older people.'

But we also have, of course, underpinning this the social services and well-being Act. I can take no credit for that—it was put in place by predecessors in the previous Assembly—but I'll tell you, when I visited a Hafod residential facility in Caerphilly about two months or three months ago, the young chap who showed us around there, Geraint, took us to visit the family and an individual with dementia: wholly different from what you might have seen years ago, because the gentleman he introduced me to who had progressive dementia—they knew from discussions with him, but also with his family, that he was an exceptionally keen gardener, always had been. So, they'd worked out the individual plan for him—the individual plan, in line with the social services and well-being Act—an individual plan with him and with his family that meant that he was actually the one who took charge of all the gardening around the place. The benefit for him in terms of independence and dignity and the status that he had, that he wasn't regarded as somebody to sit over there quietly—he didn't require masses of medication and so on there; he was actually part and parcel of the running of that facility, important to it—and his family loved it and he loved it.

So, we are starting to do these things practically, but there are other things we can do as well. So, for example, we have, as well as the RISCA regulations that we've currently been taking through this place, an ongoing care home improvement strategy that will—. It's not to say we get to a point and that we accept it—it's a constant improvement, and I hope that many Members here, as they go into residential homes nowadays, will see the difference in approach that is being done. And on top of that, we add registration of the domiciliary care workforce and we'll move on to registration and professionalisation of the residential home workforce. All of these things will have a material impact on the quality of life of our older people.

And then, for those who live independently in their own homes, it's the capital funding that the Minister for housing and I announced recently that will allow local authorities to actually work with housing associations with capital money to provide dementia-friendly communities, for example. So, it doesn't have to be necessarily in a residential home, it could be in a cottage where they are supported to live independently, with the wraparound digital provision that keeps an eye on them and so on: new ways of thinking, focusing the money on the right outcomes. And to come back to Dai's point, we will not get there overnight, but this is a different way of thinking that puts the person at the centre of it—they're wishes, they're aspirations—and then you build it around them, and we're starting to do some really interesting things.