Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 4. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:16 pm on 8 July 2020.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 2:16, 8 July 2020

Ordinarily, Llywydd, questions from Janet Finch-Saunders are for the deputy, but I think it's clear today this is for me. When it comes to the interim report that I still want to have published before we go into recess, it plainly won't be going into the level of individual detail that the Member questions.

What we will do, though, is we'll want to try to understand what has happened, both in the choices that we made at the point in time when the NHS was at real risk of being overrun if we didn't prepare—. That's why I took the decision in the middle of March to pause a range of activity and for hospitals to create space and time for staff to retrain to save lives. It's also why we've taken a range of measures throughout the pandemic to support not just the residential care sector but the broader health and social care environment. I think the interim report will have a range of lessons for the Government and more broadly. As I say, there's more learning to take from that.

When it comes to the discharge without coronavirus tests, as I've said on a number of occasions, that was because that was the state of the current advice. The decision that I took, based on that advice, was that at that point in time people without symptoms should not be tested. However, it is worth all of us remembering that a range of those people discharged were being discharged to return to their own home. I think it's important that we support people to return and be cared for in their own home as we look to support the wider care home sector. That's the approach we'll continue to take—to take learning from what's happened and to apply that to the future.