5. Will the Minister make a statement on social care provision in South Wales Central? OAQ54760

Our ambition, as set out in 'A Healthier Wales', is to bring health and social care services together so that they're designed and delivered around the needs and preferences of individuals, with a much greater emphasis on keeping people healthy and well across all regions of Wales. 

Minister, I've had a very distressing e-mail from a constituent whose 90-year-old mother was first admitted into hospital on 8 August. The situation was stabilised, and she was physically well enough to go home a couple of weeks later. She's still in hospital. They still have not had a care package to keep her at home, and, as my constituent says, 'Until hospitalisation, mum was going out every day to lunch clubs and senior groups, which has been vital for her mental health and has been a major factor in preventing her deteriorating mentally'. They're now concerned that, even if she does get back home, she will just not have the skills to, even with support, continue what's left of her life—she is 90—and the institutionalisation that's gone on day in, day out, despite the care that she gets in the hospital, is just an illustration of how we do not combine this approach of social care and hospital services working effectively, even to the point, sometimes, that we're not getting the assessments made by the right team because there are arguments about whose responsibility it is—is it the hospital team or is it the community team—to do the primary assessment. It really is a mess and we must sort it out if we're going to do the best for our constituents. 

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.