The Transfer of Patients

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:29 pm on 15 January 2020.

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Photo of Angela Burns Angela Burns Conservative 2:29, 15 January 2020

You mentioned the transformation fund, Minister, and the delayed discharges into community settings. One of the barriers is still around the whole area of funding, particularly if a person requires funding from both the health service and from the social services because of the mixed care package that they require. Quite often, there are—a kind way, perhaps, to describe it—marginal turf wars. People have got their own budgets, they've got to protect their budgets and they have to account for their budgets. I wondered what work is being done, through the transformation fund, particularly in 'A Healthier West Wales', where all of the organisations are supposedly coming together to deliver better outcomes for patients and getting them out of hospitals and back into community settings. I wonder if we're able to start learning some lessons about how we can resolve these funding issues, so that, whatever else happens, getting somebody out of a hospital and back into their home or into residential care—the block is not because of funding and who pays what element of the care that person requires.