Improving the Health Service

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:40 pm on 21 January 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:40, 21 January 2020

Well, Llywydd, I'm very glad to put on record the appreciation of the Welsh Government for all those who work at the front line of our health services under the unremitting pressures that have been there, not just over the winter, but as Angela Burns said, over many months before that. There is a lot that other people can learn from the Cwm Taf experience of handover of people from ambulances into hospitals and that's why we have a national approach to the development of ambulance services.

Mick Antoniw is right, of course, to point to the pressures that are there in our social services, as well as the health service. I mentioned in my answer to Angela Burns that there are 400 bed or bed-equivalent services being produced over this winter in addition to the normal services. About 160 of those are actually in social care, providing places where people can be safely looked after in the community, either rapidly discharged from hospital or preventing admission in the first place.

But, as I've also said previously on the floor of the Assembly, what local authorities are facing, in some ways, is a consequence of the success that they have achieved in reducing the need for residential care here in Wales. I remember reading predictions at the start of devolution that told us there would be thousands more elderly people in residential care in Wales by today and that we needed to start preparing for that. In fact, what local authorities have done is to strengthen community services so that that explosion in the need for residential care hasn't happened.

But when you are looking after more people—more fragile people, people with higher levels of need and greater intensity of service in the community—then the challenge of keeping those people well, keeping them active, returning them to their homes when they have an acute episode of care, is a genuine challenge. Of course we track it; of course we talk through the regional partnership boards and with our colleagues, and we will learn the lessons from this winter, as we begin planning—as we soon will—for the winter of next year.