Safe Discharge Procedures

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:29 pm on 29 November 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:29, 29 November 2022

Well, Llywydd, I was very sorry to read the points that the Member made last week, and I'm glad to hear that as a result of her intervention some of those difficulties have been resolved.

I have asked for an assurance from the chief executive of NHS Wales that these sorts of events are exceptional in the Welsh NHS and that the vast bulk of people who are discharged do have a proper care plan in place and are not discharged into the sorts of circumstances that we've heard about this afternoon, and I received that assurance today. Mistakes do happen, and not everything is as we would like it to be, but the idea that many people are discharged in Wales in circumstances that are not safe, I think, is not borne out by the evidence, and nor should it be.

The guidance that will be launched on 6 December will strengthen that again. It will make sure that every patient will have a discharge plan, and that discharge plan will be inaugurated on the day that the person is admitted. You should be planning for discharge from admission. The plan that will be announced on 6 December will strengthen that. That is backed up by the additional investment that the Welsh Government has provided in this financial year, which is shared investment. It is at that integrated point that the Member mentioned, where health and social care services sit down together, plan together to provide services so that, when someone is moving from one service to another, there aren't gaps in the system that cause the sort of difficulty that we were hearing about earlier.