Rebalancing care and support programme

Key recommendations

• We welcome an emphasis on co-production and prevention. Standard guidance, including nationally agreed definitions and processes should be published, and people with lived experience, clinicians and the organisations that support them must be recognised as equal partners in the system. 
• Workforce planning will be crucial: a strategic approach, working with a wide variety of stakeholders is needed to ensure flexibility of provision in the future. We need to invest in wholesale culture change, education and support for people working in the social care sector. Legislation is often misunderstood and poorly implemented.
• The financial pressure on health and social care is huge. Pooled budgets and strategic thinking must be encouraged and proactively supported at all levels. The system needs to invest in improving outcomes through signposting people to the right care, in the right place, at the right time.
• We support the idea of a new national office for care and support. However, we believe that a lot more work needs to be done around how the new national office will work with the NHS Wales Executive and other key stakeholders, including regional partnership boards. Existing frameworks and planning guidance for social care must share a strategic vision with health, ensuring that all service development and improvement is going in the same direction.
• We urge the Welsh government to clarify:
  • how regional partnership boards will work with the proposed new national office for social care and the new NHS Wales Executive
  • the relationship between regional partnership boards and public service boards and introduce a more strategic approach to transformation of care.