4. Will the Minister make a statement on the hospital discharge service requirements? OQ57663

Thank you. Discharge service guidance is in place to manage the flow of patients, particularly during the pandemic. We recently updated this guidance, taking on board the latest and more positive position with regard to COVID, in order to continue to provide a safe mechanism for discharging people from hospitals following their treatment. 

Thank you, Deputy Minister, for your statement. Llywydd, recently, my office has been told of an incident at the Grange hospital, where a constituent who is 92 years old was discharged from A&E in the early hours of the morning. They arrived home at 4 a.m. Prior to their discharge, the constituent's partner, also 92, received a phone call from the hospital at around 3 a.m., causing them to get out of bed in a hurry, despite being susceptible to falling themselves. While I acknowledge and appreciate the response from the chief executive of the health board, explaining the situation as they saw it, this doesn't detract from my concerns about the discharge procedures at that hospital. My constituent and their partner stated that they did not receive sufficient support, and that their partner had to push them, using a rollator, to get them into bed.

Minister, you will be aware of the recent report of Age Alliance Wales, which highlighted inadequacies in the procedures, and it's just not acceptable. I understand that hospitals are still under significant pressure and that the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that discharge procedures have been altered to free up beds and reduce the risk of infection. But, what has happened to the basic principles, like kindness and compassion? The NHS shouldn't be moving towards being a factory. Minister, how is the Welsh Government working with partners in the Welsh NHS to ensure that such unacceptable incidents don't happen and that discharge procedures better acknowledge the vulnerability of people like my constituent?  

Yes, I thank Peter Fox for that question, and I am concerned to hear about what happened to his constituent and the constituent's husband. It is, really, a lot of what we have been talking about this afternoon—how we get better co-ordination and better working together between the health and social services systems. Obviously, this family were in need of help—in need of social care help when they got home—and they needed that to be identified in the hospital. So, it is this link that is so important. Obviously, what happened with his constituent is something that we wouldn't want to happen to anybody. But, we are planning and working to improve the links between health and social care. In addition, the six goals for urgent and emergency care include goal 5, which is optimal hospital care and discharge practice, from the point of admission, and goal 6, which is a home-first approach and reducing the risk of readmission. These goals—five and six—seek to deliver the national discharge guidance. We have given £25 million in recurring national funding to support this—although, obviously, I accept it didn't happen in his constituent's case. This is something that we've got to work very hard on. So, we are doing that, and we are investing that money.

In addition to that, we are putting £2.6 million into non-urgent patient transport, and that's in an effort to ease pressure on the ambulance service—and we have just had a number of questions about the ambulance service. We are giving £40 million to support the recovery of social care services, and £9.8 million is allocated to regional partnership boards to support delivery of their plans to ease winter pressures, along with £32.92 million for social care pressures. So, I think you can see that we are putting a great deal of investment into the service and we are working very hard to get the partnership right between the hospital and the social care system, but I would once again like to express my sympathy for what happened to his constituents.

Would you agree with me that one of the keys to this is ensuring that we have the quality social care in the community to enable people to be discharged quickly?

Yes, it's absolutely essential that we have that quality social care, and, as we all know, social care has been under huge pressure, and we are doing all we possibly can to boost the social care service. I announced yesterday ways we were working towards attracting more social care workers to the service, because we're very short of staff, by bringing in the real living wage, along with an additional payment. We're working hard to look at terms and conditions, because I think the key to this is getting the staff—the right, quality staff—in the community, who will be there to work with vulnerable people to help stop them going into hospital, and, when they do come out of hospital, to be there to prevent them going back in. So, yes, I certainly do agree with what Jenny Rathbone has said.