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 3:25 pm on 23 October 2018.

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Photo of Dawn Bowden Dawn Bowden Labour 3:25, 23 October 2018

Thank you, Cabinet Secretary, for your statement. A lot of this has now been covered, so can I just bring you down to—it's a very simple point, actually, that I wanted to make? I've been doing a lot of work in my constituency around health and social care over the summer and into the autumn, and there is a clear suggestion that people don't always receive, certainly, the social care support that they think they should have. And although I'm treating that feedback with a little bit of caution at the moment, because I think that needs some further work, I do know that that is something that you're acutely aware of, and your £180 million announcement on the health and social care integration agenda is very much welcome in terms of moving us some way towards dealing with that whole-system approach to health and social care that clearly is the answer in the longer term.

In strengthening some of the new innovations that I've seen, and the people who I've been talking to, like the GP support officers and the community connectors, we've certainly got to continue improving the links between GPs, third sectors and local authority support. So, even at this early stage, could I ask that you give some consideration to whether greater consistency might help users to understand the innovation and change that's taking place at local level? I'll give you an example, and you and Jenny Rathbone have both alluded to this. I've been talking to GP support officers, I've been talking to social prescribers, I've been talking to community connectors, I've been talking to the virtual ward team, and by and large, they're mostly doing the same type of work. And while I accept that each of those innovations is slightly different, I do feel that some greater consistency in titles and terminology might help users to better understand what part of the service they're actually dealing with. Of course I appreciate that's probably very low down the order of your priorities in the wider scheme of things, but I do think it is important. Terminology is important and that people, when they're accessing the services, and when you're delivering the type of integrated care that we're looking at—that everybody understands that when they access that service, and when they are referred to a particular type of service, they are consistent in what they're getting and they know what they're getting in terms of the titles that people use.