Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:32 pm on 8 December 2020.
Llywydd, I thank Hefin David for that. He points to one of the acutest dilemmas in the whole coronavirus pandemic, and that is the need for relatives to be able to visit people in care homes and yet the extreme vulnerability of the care home population. So, the Welsh Government has provided regular guidance throughout the pandemic, both from the director of social services in the Welsh Government, Albert Heaney, and through the Minister, Julie Morgan. Our guidance, I think, is clear. We say to local authorities that it is important to avoid an unnecessarily restrictive blanket approach to visiting, that it needs to be calibrated in the individual circumstances faced by the local authority, but also faced by the care home itself. Obviously, nobody would wish to see visits to a care home if a care home itself is actively dealing with an outbreak of coronavirus amongst its population. But we're still in a position, Llywydd, where almost half care homes in Wales have not had a single case of coronavirus.
The lateral flow device experiment that is going on in Wales at the moment will help to allow more visits to take place. But I want to emphasise the fact that, here in Wales, all the other precautions that we would expect to see—the wearing of PPE, the maintaining of social distancing, the special measures that care homes have put in place—we still expect to see all of that happening even if someone has tested negative through a lateral flow device. And the 30 pods to which Hefin David referred, they are now provided. They'll be available for Christmas, and I know that my colleague Julie Morgan hopes to have something to say very soon on support for those providers who've been able to source their own visitor pods, again in an effort to allow visits to take place where that balance between the need for human contact with family members and the prevalence of the virus can be properly struck.