The parliamentary review of health and social care in Wales highlighted the need to continually improve the experience and quality of care, to ensure we have a health and social care system that is always learning and where the voice of the citizen is central and clearly heard. I published the Welsh Government’s response, our long-term plan for health and social care, 'A Healthier Wales' in June last year. It outlines how quality will be key to making the health and social care system in Wales fit for the future—a health and social care system that achieves good outcomes, good experience for people and the best value. Our plan sets out the ambitions of this Government to bring together health and social care services so that they are designed and delivered around the needs and preferences of people. Our plan emphasises the importance of continuous improvement and engagement with citizens that values and enables people to contribute their knowledge, experience and, of course, preferences.

The Bill represents a next step forward in the journey of ever-improving quality in health and social care. The Bill builds on the assets that we already have in Wales, to strengthen and futureproof our health and social care services, facilitating a stronger citizen voice, improving the accountability of services to deliver improved experience, better quality of care and better outcomes for people in Wales. The Bill introduces changes that will strengthen the existing duty of quality on NHS bodies and extend this to Welsh Ministers in relation to health service functions; establish an organisational duty of candour on providers of NHS services, requiring them to be open and honest with patients and service users when things go wrong; strengthen the voice of citizens, by replacing community health councils with a new all-Wales citizen voice body that will represent the interests of people across health and social care; and enable the appointment of vice-chairs for NHS trusts, bringing them into line with health boards.

The existing duty of quality in the 2003 Act has succeeded in providing some focus on improvement in quality and the development of an infrastructure. However, it has been interpreted in a relatively narrow way and led to attention on quality assurance rather than proactively planning and improving quality. Quality needs to be more extensive than this. I want quality to become a system-wide way of working, to enable safe, effective, person-centred, timely, efficient and equitable services. That must include the promotion of a learning culture. The Bill replaces the 2003 duty with a broader duty of quality, more in keeping with how we want our NHS bodies to work together. It will strengthen actions and decision making to drive improvements in quality across our system. And the duty of quality will be placed on NHS bodies and Welsh Ministers. It will ensure impact on the quality of services in its broadest sense. It will be the first consideration when making decisions about health services.

Inevitably, in a system as wide and complex as the NHS, things will occasionally go wrong. The duty of candour will help to ensure that when this happens, providers of NHS services are open and honest with people affected. Recent events in the former Cwm Taf area have shown us the importance of this. The Bill will help ensure that individuals are supported, that organisations do the right thing and use such events to learn and improve.

There is growing evidence that high-performing health and social care systems have people at their heart, and the starting point of any decision should be centred on what is best for the person. Delivering on our ambitions for improving quality means listening to and valuing the voice of people in Wales. Creating a new all-Wales citizen voice body will strengthen that voice across health and social services on national, regional and local levels. Strengthening public engagement, and supporting a stronger citizen voice, will amplify the influence of people. When triangulated with the work of the two inspectorates—Healthcare Inspectorate Wales and Care Inspectorate Wales—it will support the drive for higher-quality services.

Finally, the provisions on vice-chairs for NHS trusts will strengthen their governance arrangements and bring them into line with local health boards. This Bill is just one aspect of a suite of measures we are taking in our relentless drive towards increased quality in health and social care. We will, for instance, be taking forward separately further work around how service change decisions are made in the NHS and consider how the composition of health boards can be used to strengthen governance arrangements. We are also moving forward with work to strengthen regulation and inspection, including work to consider HIW’s legislative underpinning. In the short term, we have invested extra money to incrementally develop HIW sustainability and be ready to respond to any future new legislative framework.

It is my pleasure to introduce this Bill for scrutiny. I look forward to engaging with the Assembly and its committees over the coming months on a Bill that I believe will deliver positive benefits for the people of Wales. The Bill will help to realise our shared ambitions for a health and social care system with quality at its heart—a health and social care system that is open and honest, and where the voice of the citizen is heard loud and clear.