3. Statement by the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services: A Healthier Wales: Update on the Transformation Fund

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:19 pm on 23 October 2018.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 3:19, 23 October 2018

Thank you for the comments and questions. I'll deal with the specific points about Buurtzorg and social prescribing, and then I'll come back to the broader points about how we're moving forward, including your opening gambit.

On Buurtzorg, we have indeed invested additional money in training district nurses, looking at particular models of care, and that will, of course, feed into how we want to try and plan and deliver our services. It’s also worth mentioning that district and community nursing is an area that, of course, the chief nurse is looking at in working on whether we can extend the nurse staffing impact to understand that that's an innovation that’s already available and the principles that have already been delivered as well. District nurses are actually really important in keeping people in their own home and getting them back to their own home as well. So, we should never underestimate the importance of district nurses, and yet we rarely talk about them in this Chamber.

On your point about social prescribing, actually, when you look at a number of the projects that we have going on across the health service, social prescribing is a much more important feature of that. In some of the money that I announced on mental health and social prescribing, all of them have the direct link between social prescribing and mental health—every single one of those projects and partnerships that I've already given funding to over the last year. Not only that, though, but if you look at Me, My Home, My Community, the first project under the transformation fund, that has social prescribing as one of the seven elements to it. If you look at the Cwmtawe cluster approach that I've announced today, that too has social prescribing as part of it as well. So, we're looking to develop the evidence base for social prescribing, and in each one of the areas of Wales that you look at, you will see social prescribing as a deliberate attempt for the health service to work together with the care service and, of course, with the third sector and the citizen to understand how we help them.

Now, on your broader point about the Canterbury system, it's been interesting, of course, that Cardiff and Vale have taken inspiration from that. They have a settlement and an agreement over time on what to do to so they had consistency in approach. And the Me, My Home, My Community approach builds on Canterbury, but equally, when I was at the launch of this event, people from Canterbury were there and they were looking for things that they, too, could learn and take back to Canterbury. So, it is a genuine learning opportunity that goes in both directions. They're actually impressed by the unity of purpose and vision that are being delivered across health and social care. So, we should take some positives from what our staff are actually doing and delivering, now they have the opportunity to work deliberately together.

Much of the Get Me Home and Get Me Home Plus scheme that you see within the Cardiff and Vale Me, My Home, My Community, looks very similar to what’s happened in Cwm Taf with their partners in social care with the 'stay well at home' scheme, which, of course, was what I and the Minister visited on the day we launched 'A Healthier Wales', and they were the big winner in this year’s NHS Wales awards, too—a partnership between health and local government. That really is the future. That’s why we’ve placed so much emphasis on regional partnership boards. Where we’re getting the greatest gain and the greatest value is where people are deliberately working with each other, within the health system, the join-up between hospitals and community services and, even more importantly, the join-up between the health and the social care system and, indeed, the citizen. It’s a deliberate direction of travel, and we will only do it if our partners are able to sit in the same room and they want the same priorities for the same citizen.