6. Debate on the Health and Social Care Committee Report: Hospital discharge and its impact on patient flow through hospitals

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:50 pm on 12 October 2022.

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Photo of Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan Labour 4:50, 12 October 2022

Gareth, I would absolutely love to do that, that is absolutely our ambition as a Government, it's in our manifesto, that's what we want to see, it's just that your Government has just made that a hell of a lot more difficult. We've just had a £207 million bill for energy that we weren't expecting, and we've got a bit of a rebate from the UK Government—maybe £100 million—but that leaves me with £100 million gap that I've got to find from somewhere. So, that is a problem, and that's going to be a problem next year. We decide as a Government where that money's going to go. And we actually spend about 33 per cent more on social care in Wales than they do in England already, so I'd hate to imagine what state the care system is in England if they're spending 33 per cent less than us. Huw, you were mentioning that we've got to put this funding together—we have. We are putting £144 million where we expect local authorities and health boards to determine together how they're going to spend that money, and it's all in this space, it's all in this space, which is about how we address this delayed transfer of care bill. There are a couple of other issues in there as well—mental health and whatever—but a huge amount of it is about this delayed transfer of care. 

The community care capacity initiative that we have embarked on now is aiming to deliver additional system capacity from October this year until April 2023. This is something, again, that we've been working on over the whole summer, and the objective is to create extra step-down-to-recover beds and community equivalent provision, alongside taking additional measures to boost the community care workforce. And the focused effort for this winter is consistent with and complimentary to that urgent and emergency care programme of work, and I look forward to giving you a bit more detail on that, because we have been working really, really hard to prepare for building that additional community capacity over the winter. So, capacity within social care is an area that we absolutely are focused on. We are aware that the lack of sufficient numbers of social care staff is having an impact on patient discharge, and we've got a number of actions to deal with this. Additionally, each region has developed a plan to increase its community social care capacity and is co-ordinating recruitment drives at local and regional levels.

Now, a couple of people talked about the need for systems—digital systems—to work together, and what we have now is the Wales community care information system. We've already spent £30 million on this, and we intend to spend £12 million additional in the next three years. And what this is going to do is to integrate social services and community health data, so that they can have shared electronic records for health and care, so we get the systems talking to each other. We've got to get modern here; this is going to help us to get modern, and this is going to do some of issues that many of you were talking about, and getting data—why are people stuck and what is stopping them? I think that's really important. We've done a huge amount of work with local government to identify exactly why people are not moving in the system. Is it because their medicines haven't arrived? Is it because they haven't got transport home? Is it because there's nobody to look after them when they get home? So, all of those things, we've broken it all down and we're coding it and we're making sure that we know why people are stuck there.