Diolch yn fawr. 'Looking Forward Together: The Allied Health Professions Framework for Wales' identifies the changes required both by allied health professionals and their employers to ensure health and social care secures the highest quality and value from these important professions. 'A Healthier Wales' sets out our vision for enabling people to live at home, as independently as possible, for as long as possible. 

The allied health professionals, or AHPs, excel in delivering treatments that are particularly valuable in supporting the complex needs of people who are frail or living with long-term health conditions. They are a group of 13 unique professions, such as physiotherapists, occupational therapists, dietitians and psychologists. At present, too small a proportion of AHPs are accessible in the primary and community services described in the primary care model for Wales.

Many people who need the expertise of AHPs can't directly access them early enough to maximise their health and well-being or improve recovery. This may mean people are admitted to hospital when they could have been treated at home, or they cannot be discharged from hospital when their acute treatment is complete. Without community AHP services, people may end up moving to residential or nursing care earlier than might otherwise have been the case, adding to the pressure on our social care services.

Today, I'm announcing £5 million will be made available from April 2023 to create additional AHP posts in primary and community services to help provide alternatives to hospital admission and reduce reliance on long-term social care. This recurrent investment supports our programme for government commitments in primary and community care, including improving access to health professionals and bring a wider workforce together in a reformed primary care system. It'll create posts for both registered AHPs and support workers. For example, extra staff in community resource teams will help implement the community infrastructure programme or expand hospital-at-home-type services.

Increasing community rehabilitation and community-based therapy ensures people can be discharged with the right support to enable them to complete their recovery at home. Community rehabilitation or reablement helps people recover their ability and confidence to do the things that matter to them in their daily life, enabling more people to live independently without having to rely on unnecessary long-term social care. That will help us to provide these vital services to the people who need them most.

This investment can also be used to develop or expand services to prevent admission. For example, this could enable paramedics to directly refer to community falls or therapy response teams rather than conveying people to hospital if they don't need it.

There are many examples of innovative AHP services providing direct, early access to intervention, community rehabilitation and reablement and other complex treatments in the community. We need to provide these more consistently across Wales in line with all our national programmes. Local authority occupational therapy services and many NHS physiotherapy services are already directly accessible. In Swansea Bay University Health Board, podiatry, children’s speech and language therapy and children’s occupational therapy services are directly accessible.