North Wales project to transform care for people with learning disabilities

Health Secretary, Vaughan Gething, today (Tuesday, 30 October) announced £1.69m funding over two years for the North Wales Regional Partnership Board to develop new ways of working that could eventually be used across Wales.

The funding comes from the £100m Transformation Fund to support key actions from the Welsh Government’s long term plan for health and social care, A Healthier Wales. 

Through better integrating health, social care and the third sector, the project aims to help people with learning disabilities live more independently and get the care they need to closer to home. 

The project aims to achieve this in a number of different ways:

• Better integration of health and social services and less duplication of record systems so people only have to ‘say it once’.
• Workforce development to create better awareness of disability issues among the wider public sector workforce. This approach should reduce the demand for specialist learning disability services in future.
• Uses of assistive technology to help people with learning disabilities become more independent in their everyday lives.
• Community and culture change. Increasing number of people employed in paid work, accessing training, and volunteering. More effective regional approaches for social prescribing.

Mr Gething said: 

“Our long term plan for health and social care, sets out how we will transform the way we deliver care to ensure it is sustainable in the future. 

This will require better integration of health and social services to reduce reliance on hospitals and deliver care closer to home. The Transformation Fund will be used to fund a small number of projects which have the most impact in developing and delivering new models of care, and which have potential to scale up so they can be used across Wales. 

This project aims to deliver better integration of services for people with learning disabilities to help them live more independent lives. I hope many of these new ideas can then be rolled out across Wales to provide a better service for patients and reduce the pressure on certain parts of the NHS and social services.”

Councillor Gareth Roberts, Chairman of the North Wales Regional Partnership Board, said: 

“We are delighted to hear that our bid for funding has been successful. We have a big ambition in North Wales to improve health and social care, with a clear focus on putting people first and working our services around the needs of residents.

“In a region such as ours, sharing resources, experiences and skills is vital. We all have a common goal and there is a commitment from all organisations to work towards making this dream become reality. Transforming services around learning disabilities has been identified as one of our key areas of work over the coming years and we look forward to using this funding to strengthen and enhance our current quality services to make them even better.”