Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:23 pm on 23 October 2018.
I recognise you mentioned particular points, yet I’m looking for the voice of the citizen, and the citizen isn’t one single person with one single characteristic, and I don’t want a narrow tick-box exercise so that people can tick off and say they’ve had a conversation with someone who has a particular characteristic. It is about how we serve the citizen and serve the community. So, in actually delivering a Get Me Home and Get Me Home Plus scheme and delivering the 'stay well at home' service, you have to look at that person in their context. So, if that person has sensory impairment, we have to understand how that impacts on their care choices, the information and communication that they will need, and that we actually understand what matters to them. If that person is a primary carer for another person—indeed, when we visited Doreen on the first day, her primary concern was not herself, actually; her primary concern when she broke her ankle was who was going to look after her husband, who was older than her and who she was the primary carer for. That was what she was most concerned about and why she didn't want to stay in hospital herself. So, it’s understanding her as a person, the context she was in, and not just seeing her as an old woman who needed to stay for a week in a hospital, to understand why it mattered to her to get her home quickly. And they built the support around her by understanding what mattered to her, and that's what we need to see. So, it isn't about saying, 'Have you spoken to this group, that group or another?', but to understand, if you're directing a service, for example learning disability services, whether you've directly engaged with people who take part in that service—not just the staff, but the citizen as well.
So, yes, that is what I would expect to see in each of the choices that I will make about the advice that I receive, to understand where the voice of the citizen is, how have their needs been taken account of, and, crucially, how we understand if we've made a difference. That comes back again through the evaluation points that have already been made by our colleague Angela Burns.