Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:16 pm on 23 October 2018.
I'm delighted by your statement, particularly by your recognition that this is not just about £100 million, it is about the £9 billion that we currently spend on the health service, because if we're going to deliver 'A Healthier Wales' we are going to need to transform the whole service. Cardiff and the Vale is an excellent example of how it would be possible to simply suck all the resources into hospital care as the hospital consultants are very powerful, so I'm delighted that Cardiff and the Vale have embraced the Canterbury experience, which indicates that it is possible to reverse trends in terms of more and more elderly people ending up in hospital, when, in fact, with better community support, they could be staying at home, which is obviously what people want. So, I'm very keen to hear more about Me, My Home, My Community and what outcomes we're going to be measuring to ensure that this is the right model that we could be rolling out to others.
We learnt from the Canterbury, New Zealand, model that it has slowed demand for acute care, but that it takes time—it doesn't happen overnight. One of the things that Canterbury has is the 'one system, one budget' mantra. So, how has that approach got on with being developed in regional partnership boards? I appreciate it's work in progress. And where does Buurtzorg sit in this, which is obviously neighbourhood care pioneered by the Dutch? So, in my mind, the spotlight can't just be on the transformation fund, it has to be on the whole-system approach to this, because simply throwing more money at pharmaceutical companies isn't going to actually transform the health of our nation.
I'm particularly interested in some of the social prescribing that is being pioneered in the south-west cluster of Cardiff, which I'd love to see being developed in my constituency, active ageing programmes, things to reduce loneliness and isolation through referring people to gardening projects, and something called the Grow Well project in south-west Cardiff. It would be fantastic if we could see that sort of thing going on in other parts of the city.
The east Cardiff cluster was established as an informal system by the east Cardiff, Llanedeyrn and Pentwyn Communities First, but of course that has now ended. So, I wonder what intelligence you're able to share with us about how well that sort of social prescribing is moving forward in the absence of these Communities First programmes?