Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 3:06 pm on 27 November 2019.
I thank David Melding for that question and I'm very sorry for the experiences that his constituent has had. Overall, there is a reducing trend in the level of patients who are delayed in hospital beds in the South Wales Central region. However, I am concerned about a variation between the different local authorities in the region, with some areas recently seeing an increase on last year's numbers and others a decrease. I'm very much aware that there are still too many patients who are awaiting packages of domiciliary care services to facilitate their discharge. We know that the demands for services have increased a lot recently, in recent years, and we are making great efforts to try to ensure that people are able to leave hospital at a timely pace, or are able to be prevented from going into hospital in the first place, by the services working together, and it's absolutely essential, as the Member says, that health and the local authority work together to ensure that this happens. We do have some very good examples, mainly funded through the integrated care fund, where this does happen, but I absolutely accept that there is a lot of work to do on this issue and the Minister for health and I will be going around and discussing this with the different local health boards in the near future.