4. Statement by the Deputy Minister for Social Services: Update on the Health and Social Services Regional Integration Fund

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:29 pm on 21 March 2023.

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Photo of Julie Morgan Julie Morgan Labour 3:29, 21 March 2023

Thank you very much, Rhun, for those questions and comments. This certainly does replace the ICF and the transformation fund. It is a consolidation and is making sure that some of these ideas and projects that have been so successful are moving towards consolidation, because I think the main thing we have to try to do is to mainstream these projects. I think I can reassure you that some of them have been transformational, but what we have to do now is to move beyond that and to make them embedded so that they're right throughout the whole of the system. We are learning from them. There are communities of practice, communities looking at each different area that we're looking at. We're trying to make absolutely sure that these are not just isolated projects, but are projects that are shared throughout Wales. 

In terms of the spending, well, last year's spending was nearly £145 million, which is a large amount of money that we're putting in, and we're putting that in for five years. The largest percentage of that money was spent on community capacity building, and three of the six models were on that. So, we had, for example, home from hospital—18 per cent of the funding went on that; community-based care, prevention and community co-ordination—27 per cent. I think, on those sorts of projects, about 60 per cent was spent on that. So that was, basically, building up the capacity, the community care capacity, which I think is very crucial. 

And a lot of it is preventative, because the more that we can support people at home to live independent lives, to live successfully, that's where we will prevent the need for having to go into hospital, where people do become weaker, and it's more difficult to get people home. So, we have got ambitious plans to develop this preventative work in the community much more, and, of course, we do want to move towards a national care service, where we will build upon all this work that is actually being done now.