End-of-life Care

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:30 pm on 13 December 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:30, 13 December 2022

I thank Jayne Bryant for what she said about the palliative care quality statement, which my colleague Eluned Morgan publicised recently. It picks up many of the points that the Member has just made, Llywydd. We're not good at talking about these things in our culture. In many ways, those conversations need to start far earlier than when people are faced with those incredibly difficult end-of-life decisions.

I worked closely at one point with the Byw Nawr programme, led as it was by our former colleague Hywel Francis. That was all about encouraging people to have those conversations before you reach the point of needing to have them, to make advanced decisions, as you're able to make here in Wales, letting the system know how you would wish to be cared for should you find yourself in those circumstances. That sense of that being a genuine conversation between the individual, with rights, with ambitions for their own life, with decisions that they themselves can exercise, and the system that will help to care for them, was absolutely at the centre of that initiative. I'm sure that, as we move forward with that wider end-of-life development that I talked about, those qualities will be captured again in those conversations.