Wheelchair services to be examined in Assembly inquiry

5 March 2012

The National Assembly for Wales’s Health and Social Care Committee will hold a one-day inquiry concerning wheelchair services in Wales on Thursday, 8 March.

The Committee will revisit the findings of a report published by its predecessor, the Health, Wellbeing and Local Government Committee.

The report highlighted a disparity in the standard of service between north and south Wales. It found people in the north waited longer for wheelchairs than those in the south, and users with complex needs, including children, often suffered the longest waits with detrimental impacts on their mobility, growth and development.

Among the report’s recommendations was a strategic plan to give direction to the service, a pooling of existing budgets to provide equipment for users and a more performance-measured approach to monitoring services.

In total the report contained 23 recommendations, all of which were accepted by the then Minister for Health and Social Services in June 2010.

The Health and Social Care Committee aims to establish what progress has been made regarding implementation of those recommendations.

“It is almost two years since the publication of the report and the Committee has decided to review the progress made to date in improving the standard of wheelchair services in Wales,” said Mark Drakeford AM, Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee.

“We will be gathering evidence from a number of perspectives during the course of this inquiry, including from wheelchair users, practitioners, charitable providers, the NHS in Wales and policy makers.”