I recognise the comments made by committee members about support for self-isolation. Our test, trace, protect service does contact people who are isolating. It's how they understand how successfully people are or aren't isolating. I've had feedback from my own constituents and others about the difference that call has made to them successfully continuing with self-isolation. But I recognise the issues raised by not just the King's Fund report, but also by SAGE and others about the concern over people not successfully self-isolating. So, it was welcome when Michael Gove, in a call with First Ministers across the UK, confirmed there should be new money available to match the policy offer that had already been announced in England—of a £500 additional payment on top of statutory sick pay for low-paid workers. We now expect the UK Treasury to honour that commitment, so the First Minister has been in a position to confirm that we will introduce that payment to make sure that people can successfully self-isolate.

Care home providers, as well as people living and working in care homes, have faced an unprecedented challenge this year, and my sympathies are with those who have faced months of separation from family and friends, and especially to those who have lost loved ones. We supported the sector through this exceptionally difficult period, and we'll continue to do so. We'll be publishing our care home action plan that the Deputy Minister has committed to. That will set out the actions we're taking to ensure that the care home sector is well supported ahead of the challenges of the winter period.

We have been challenged—we heard it again today—about the approach we took in discharging people from hospital to care homes during the initial phase of the pandemic. And if I can take this opportunity to draw the committee's attention to recent research undertaken by Public Health Wales in partnership with Swansea University. That research found no evidence that hospital discharges were in fact associated with a significant risk of a new outbreak in a care home. However, the size of a care home was found to be associated with this risk. Research investigating into how other factors, including policies around staff and visitors, might affect risk continues to be prioritised in support of our efforts to reduce or eliminate care home outbreaks.

Restricting visits to care homes has been exceptionally difficult and, in fact, heartbreaking, and we heard this again today in the committee. But it has been one of the necessary measures that we have had to take at various stages in the pandemic to reduce the risk of infection to care homes. We've worked collaboratively with the sector to produce guidance to support providers to reintroduce visits safely as lockdown restrictions were eased over the summer. That work continues, and I know that the group met again this week to consider how the guidance is working in practice, and, again, the understanding that there should be not be an entire blanket policy—there should always be an individual circumstance where the care needs of that individual could or should be met by visits.

Recent local restrictions mean that local authorities have again had to make some very difficult choices about care home visits, striking a balance between people's continued well-being and the risk presented by increased community transmission. And I again encourage our local authority partners to engage with Public Health Wales, working with their local incident management teams in reaching those decisions. I expect restrictions to be temporary, to be as least restrictive as is safe, and to be kept under review. A rapid response system is in place for local health boards to deploy mobile testing units to those care homes where there is a positive case, and a dedicated care home testing portal is available for ongoing testing of care home staff.

It is worth pointing out on PPE, which the chair spent time on in introducing, that since 9 March, NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership have issued 342.3 million items across our health and social care system, and 167 million items have been issued to social care—that's 48 per cent of the total of items. And we're still issuing around about 13 million items a week. The scale of activity is still significant, and since the very early days of the pandemic, we have provided that free of charge to care home providers. It is the legal responsibility of employers to provide PPE for their workforce. The NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership stepped in because otherwise we would have had an unacceptable risk of harm to staff and the people they care for, and I'm pleased to see that England have recently announced they will follow the lead that we have taken in making that provision of PPE freely available to the care home sector.

We've also been able to provide mutual aid to other UK countries, we have a healthy supply chain of future orders and we are in a much more robust position and we are stockpiling for the winter ahead and for future provision. In fact, I think our system stood up well to the extraordinary pressures and the very sharp tightening in the international market that we saw. That's both in ordering and delivering more PPE into the country, and, in fact, we've provided some assistance in terms of the conversations with England where they've had to reconstruct a central purchasing and procurement operation that was lost in the Lansley reforms. But more than that, we've also, as Dai Rees mentioned, seen Welsh businesses and manufacturers respond significantly to the challenge of creating more PPE. And in the future we'll need to have a different balance in what we procure from other countries and what we continue to provide from manufacturers here in Wales. There may be an additional cost per item to that, but it's the right thing to do to make sure that we have a more robust system in place.