Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:26 pm on 11 May 2022.
Wait a minute—that is not my job as a politician. That is not my job. That is the job of the NHS health boards, and it's my job to hold them to account, and it's my job to set them targets and to hold their feet to the fire for those targets and those outcomes, and that's what I'm doing. But I will not be getting involved in writing contracts for people, and I think it's really important that we understand where the lines are here.
Lots of people have pointed to the need to do something about the delayed transfers of care, and it is a really difficult situation we're in here. Let me tell you that, at this point in time, about 43 per cent of our care homes are closed in Wales as a result of COVID. This is not something we've created. These are the circumstances we're in at the moment. Now, I can't take full responsibility for that. One in 25 people in Wales have COVID at the moment, so these are pressures that we're having to deal with. We could have published our plan a year ago, but what would the point of that have been? Because there is no way you can respond if you know that, actually, you're going to have wave after wave of COVID, where you can't actually see the movement and progress that we want to see.
So, I think it's really important that we understand that COVID is still with us. There are 700,000 open pathways, and we're very aware of that, and I can tell you it keeps me awake every single night, but they're pathways—they're not all individual people. There are lots of people who have more than one pathway that they are on. I was clear that it would take the full Senedd term and a lot of hard work to recover from the impact of the pandemic, and I was interested—. Rhun and Jenny always talk about the importance of the prevention agenda. This was very much a planned care programme, and I can tell you that I am not taking my eyes off the planned care agenda, because, frankly, they will just keep coming into the system unless we do something on the prevention agenda. I've been meeting with the World Health Organization this morning, who are very interested in our prevention agenda, and it's really important that we don't take our foot off the pedal on that. If you were in the Chamber yesterday, you'll have heard about our outcomes framework, which is all really geared to the preventative agenda.