Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:38 pm on 15 June 2022.
Thank you very much, and thank you also to the committee for the recommendations. I will be taking time to go through those recommendations, and I’m sure there’ll be a lot of ideas contained in them. It’s not something that we’ve been ignoring, it’s something that we’ve been paying a great deal of attention to. But as the committee now understands, it is a very complex system, where you have to aim to make improvement on every level of the system, including the care system, which we’ve been discussing this morning.
With regard to the number of beds in Wales, of course, what we have to remember is that, ideally, what we want to see is patients going in, being treated and then returning home. We want to see more care in the home for patients. And certainly, that’s where my focus is—to try to get people discharged from hospital as soon as possible. And what that means, if truth be told, is that you want fewer beds because you want them to be discharged and at home. What we want to do is to strengthen the care in those communities, as you say, and that’s what I want to see. It's interesting that the Nuffield Trust, for example, last week, had stated in their report that there are