Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:22 pm on 1 February 2022.
I very much welcome the statement by the Minister on the social care regional integration fund. Integrated social care and health, with patients at the heart of provision, has got to be what we're all aiming for. I remember when Jane Hutt launched the first joint social services and health scheme over 20 years ago.
I've long called for focusing on preventing illness and hospitalisation. That's really got to be where we're moving towards, not waiting for people to be ill and then trying to make them better, or in some cases not, but trying to stop them needing to go in in the first place and stop them needing medication. I welcome that there is going to be a clear outcome framework; too often, money is spent on health with no measurable outcomes, it's just, 'Money spent on health is good, isn't it? It doesn't matter what it does with it.' I once said that if somebody stood outside a hospital and dropped pound coins down a drain, as long as it was health pound coins dropped down the drain, a lot of people would be saying how wonderful it is.
So, I think what I would like to ask—[Interruption.] What I would would like to ask is: will the Minister arrange for publication of the expected outcomes? I apologise to the Minister for this, because I'm going to be asking this on every single thing that the Minister and others bring forward: what are the outcomes? What are we hoping to achieve? And not, 'We've spent a lot of money; isn't it good?' What are we hoping to achieve and how can we see whether this works? And sometimes it won't, and I think that we've all got to be grown up enough, even on opposition benches, to realise that sometimes it won't work, but doing it is the right idea and we'll learn from what hasn't worked out properly.
And the last question I've got is: will the community support for hospitals at home be funded by this or will it be funded separately? Because, really, that has to be one of the best things we can do. It's been pushed forward by a number—by the Royal College of Physicians, by the royal college of geriatric medicine—that, actually, dealing with people at home, giving them the full service at home, is going to make them better quicker and it will improve outcomes considerably. So, is that funded by this, or will you be coming with another statement saying that it will be funded somewhere else?