I have also constituted an advisory board, made up of senior health and social care leaders, together with key partners from across sectors and geographical regions of Wales, to provide strategic oversight, advice and challenge to the programme. This board has already met twice and is providing real additional value with the expertise and influence it is able to provide to our work.    

When the plan, 'A Healthier Wales' was published, I also announced that additional money was being made available to health and social care providers in Wales through our £100 million transformation fund over two years to support the testing of new service models on the ground. In July, we wrote to our health and social care partners inviting them to work together through their regional partnership boards to develop and submit proposals for potential support from the transformation fund. We asked partners to design proposals in line with our shared ambitions set out in 'A Healthier Wales', and in particular our vision and our design principles. This should guide thinking around new models of seamless care. We all recognise the need to bring services together, closer to home, and these new ways of working must have the potential to be scaled up across regions and, of course, at an all-Wales level.

I am pleased to report that we have already received eight proposals from regional partnership boards, with more in development. I have confirmed support for two of these proposals, including Western Bay’s Cwmtawe cluster integrated health and social care programme that I can announce today, following the Cardiff and Vale’s Me, My Home, My Community project that I announced and visited last week. These pilots will allow us to test and evaluate new approaches to care that support the principles set out in 'A Healthier Wales', including early identification and intervention to support at-risk individuals, innovative use of technology and information sharing to enable different services to work together, and multidisciplinary community-based approaches to care provision. All of these should reduce pressure on our GPs and hospitals and, of course, provide a better service for the public. 

The strength of the proposals that we have received so far, and the manner in which partners have generally worked together to develop these ideas in a short time, gives me great encouragement that our regional partnership boards will deliver on their role as the primary agents of change and transformation. However, I also recognise that if regional partnership boards are to play the leading role in transformation—and we know that they have the ambition to do so—they will need sufficient resource and expertise to do so. That is why I have confirmed in our 2019-20 budget proposals that regional partnership boards will receive an additional £30 million. This additional support will strengthen regional partnership boards and ensure that they are able to meet the challenges ahead. 

Whilst the transformation fund has, understandably, attracted much interest, I will say again now, as I have said many times since we published the plan, service transformation must be a core activity for all health and social care organisations. Strong system leadership will be required to drive the change needed across Wales. Ultimately, it will not be the £100 million transformation fund but the £9 billion of core funding that our health and social services receive each year that will deliver transformation. I have been at pains to point out that the transformation fund is itself only one small part of the much wider programme of change set out in 'A Healthier Wales' that we are now embarked upon and committed to delivering.

I would like to take a short amount of time to update you on some of the other work we have already begun in support of those wider actions. The plan promised stronger national leadership from the centre and a commitment to simplify, where possible, some of the planning and reporting arrangements that have grown around the health service in particular over time. In relation to the first of these, I can confirm that work is well under way in relation to our planned NHS executive. In relation to planning requirements, earlier this month I issued revised integrated medium-term plan guidance that sets out a more streamlined and joined-up process that we are supporting with an additional £60 million of new funding.

In keeping with our drive for greater emphasis on health promotion, I launched our healthy and active fund in the summer together with the Minister for Culture, Tourism and Sport within the Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney constituency. This partnership is with Public Health Wales and Sport Wales. 

In support of our workforce objectives, we have announced new pay deals, extended our 'Train. Work. Live.' programme, commissioned Social Care Wales and Health Education and Improvement Wales to develop our new workforce strategy. We've refocused a new national leadership group that now includes representatives from the social care sector as well as the national health service. I will of course be happy to provide further updates to Members in the future to update you on progress.