Improving the Health Service

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:35 pm on 21 January 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:35, 21 January 2020

—to prevent people from needing access to the health service, that, of course, is a proper investment in the future; it's not an answer to the person aged over 75 who needs services in the here and now. The parliamentary review, in which parties across this Chamber participated, provides a bridge of that sort. It describes how you can incrementally—because that is the only way you can do it—shift the system so there is greater emphasis on prevention, and therefore a reduced need for people to seek help in the most intense part of the system. That doesn't help people whose needs for that sort of help are in the present day, and you can't not attend to those needs.

And prevention is not the responsibility of the national health service; prevention is something that you can only bring about where you have all public services invested in doing that and where you have a relationship with the user in which they too play their part. We talk often on the floor of the Assembly about co-production, and the need to capture the contribution that users make, and nowhere is that contribution more important to capture than if we are genuinely to have preventative services. Because most of all, that relies on what individuals can do to make sure that the harm that would otherwise happen in their own lives is avoided.