Llywydd, the advice deals directly with ensuring that people are not discharged in circumstances that would lead to their rapid readmission. It talks about people who are, for example, waiting for an assessment, and suggests that it is better that someone might wait for an assessment at home, rather than waiting in a hospital bed—a hospital bed that is then not available for someone who is not in a medically stable condition waiting for assessment, but is waiting to get in through the hospital door to receive the treatment that they need. The balance of risk is something that the health service deals with day in and day out, and always has.

What the letter did was to make sure that the clinicians knew that, in making those decisions, they had the support of their most senior colleagues in the service in Wales behind them in making those difficult decisions. There is nothing in the letter at all that suggests that anybody should be unsafely discharged, that anybody should be discharged in circumstances where it would be known that that person would need to seek readmission. It simply sought, in a responsible way, to respond to the circumstances of the health service by saying that people who could be safely looked after at home could be accelerated in that journey in order to make sure, in one of the most basic principles of the whole of the NHS, that those with the greatest need were able to get to the front of the queue.