Diolch yn fawr. I welcome the report, and I'd like to commend the committee on its really thorough approach to the review. The report explores a wide spectrum of areas that can impact patient flow through our hospitals, and ultimately on to discharge and recovery. What we've heard today is how complex the situation is. It has got to be a whole-system approach, because unless we do it as a whole system, some part will bung up the other part. The recommendations that you've made will be valuable in helping to provide further steer and focus as we tackle improvements in this area. We've provided our formal response to the report. I welcome the comments provided today by Members, and I wanted to use this opportunity to highlight a number of key measures that we're taking forward in support of addressing patient flow and safe and timely discharge.

Now, in order to make improvements to our systems, we must look not only at patient flow and discharge, but also at community responses and admission avoidance services. So, it's not just at the end of the system, as you suggested there, it's actually, 'How do we stop them from coming in in the first place?' as well. It's the preventative, so, again, that's an extra complication, but we're putting a huge amount of resource and work into those prevention measures as well. We have work under way focused on anticipating care and to support people closer to home, wherever that may be, and we seek the best clinical response for them.

Part of that prevention strategy is within our six goals for urgent and emergency care, and that's a strategic primary care programme, so it brings in primary, secondary and ambulance and all of those. This is all being developed by clinicians and they've told us, 'This is what will work'. So, we've got six goals. A lot of it is about prevention, a lot of it is about, 'How quickly can you get people out? Where is the flow coming from?' I expect all services to use that home-first principle and to adhere to the discharge to recover then assess pathway. So, we know that it's better to make an assessment in someone's home, rather than in a hospital bed. That's something I'm really pushing on, so the reablement, for me, has got to be done in the home, so getting those occupational therapists back out into the community is really important.

It's important also that we provide same-day emergency care and support people to return home without admission into hospital. Estimated dates of discharge should be set early and communicated so that all the teams, both within the hospital and community know what's being planned, and then allocating the correct discharge to release is really important, and to ensure that we have fewer days when someone is in hospital.

Gareth, you mentioned that we should be planning for winter. I can assure you that we've been planning for winter since April. We have been preparing for this. It is now built into our annual structure. That £25 million we put in right at the beginning of the process, because we know that if you start recruiting in September, it's too late, you've got to train people up. So, we've had this huge campaign over the summer to recruit people into the care service, into reablement, because, actually, we needed them ready for the autumn. So, all of this is being prepared, the money—usually, what we do is we give a lump of money now, but it's too late, and everybody's asked us. So, we're doing that already.

As well as introducing revised pathway processes—