8. Welsh Conservatives Debate: Community Mental Health Teams

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:33 pm on 3 April 2019.

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Photo of Helen Mary Jones Helen Mary Jones Plaid Cymru 5:33, 3 April 2019

I think, absolutely, it could. I think we might bring a very different set of values to those assessments and I'm very glad that the Welsh Government has finally agreed to keep that under review.

I'll turn very briefly, with the Llywydd's indulgence, to our amendment 2, which looks at the case for data. If I can just give one example very briefly, we've been raising for a long time the waiting times in CAMHS. The then First Minister rightly said that there were probably too many young people on the CAMHS pathway who didn't need to be there. A decision was made in 2017 to remove some 1,700 children from the pathway—around 74 per cent of them were on waiting lists at the time. Now, that may have been absolutely the right thing to do for those individual young people, but my point is that we don't really know—we don't really know where they went, we don't really know what their outcomes were, and we don't know if they actually got more appropriate interventions.

Darren Millar has already referred to some of the issues around the lack of information, the lack of data—I am absolutely shocked, though sadly not surprised, that there is a local health board that simply can't tell people about the number of referrals to their community mental health teams. I'm sure the Minister would agree with all of us that this isn't acceptable and I would urge him again today to accelerate that 2022 deadline for effective collection of data. We cannot solve the problem if we don't know how big it is and we don't know what it looks like. Even with the best will in the world even the most gifted Minister in the world cannot do that.

So, I'll end my remarks, Llywydd, by thanking again the Conservatives, thanking them for accepting our amendments, and commending this motion and our amendments to the Chamber.