Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:54 pm on 4 March 2020.
Thank you, and thank you to those who have contributed; I appreciate the response we've had. What I will start with is: you said, Deputy Minister, that it won't happen overnight, and I appreciate that any service change will take time, but I think what I would urge you to do in that sense, therefore, is to ensure that the people who contributed to the review—be they patients, be they carers, be they loved ones—are fully engaged in the timelines that you do have.
Because what they told me was that, once they'd contributed to Jacinta Tan's review, there was a drop-off and they didn't find out from Welsh Government what was happening. They weren't kept in the loop. And they don't have anything more that they want to be able to do than to find out what's happening and to be involved. So, I would urge you, even if you're going to tell them, 'It's going to take a bit of time, please bear with us', do you know what, they're not going to criticise you for that, because they know you're giving them that information? So, please, be abreast of that.
You say that extra funding will be necessary and you are approaching civil servants to look at how that will happen. Obviously, you will have read in Jacinta Tan's review that she would be predicting around £9 million to be able to do that. So, I would like to understand what your civil servants are doing in terms of costing different models and how they are going to approach that in future budgetary requirements, therefore. Because of course, at the moment, it's still the £1 million recurrent that we campaigned for in 2007, and things have changed since then. Yes, pockets of money have gone into different services, like transition and such, and that's something I totally welcome, but fundamentally it's still quite small in relation to the budget of the NHS in its entirety. And as we've said, again, people die from this condition, and we want to stop that happening in the future.
So, I'll finish now, and I would just like to say that it's not something that should be—. Mental health in all of its forms, as we'll discuss in the next debate, is important, but specifically, eating disorders don't just come into health, they come into education as well. Many people have told me that they go into schools and they would like to have more information about what that means to them. Emily Hoskins, who was here earlier, said her father is a teacher and people were telling people in school—just because they knew that Emily had an eating disorder—if they had an eating disorder in that school that they could go and see him. Well, he was dealing with that as a carer, and then coming in and people referring him to help those with eating disorders. That wasn't really appropriate.
So, I think we need to look at all elements of society and how not only the education system can accommodate those who need it, but also how the health system then can be amended to ensure that those who need treatment get it in a timely fashion and get the treatment they need for their own demands, here in society.