National Assembly for Wales

The Minister for Mental Health and Early Years is focused on ensuring our programmes and interventions are aligned and fit for purpose, and we will continue to work with our partners to focus our efforts on improving health outcomes for children and young people.

The NHS Providers report Forgotten generation: shaping better services for children and young people is an English report. However, we recognise there are challenges in children's healthcare services and we are committed to improving the health of children and young people in Wales and to ensuring they have the best start in life.

While there has been a very small increase in the overall number of children’s pathways waiting in May 2024 (57,912) compared to April 2022, there has been a 75% reduction in the number of long waits of more than two years over the same period.

A comprehensive range of policies and programmes play a pivotal role in improving outcomes and promoting child health and well-being, including:

• Our Healthy Child Wales Programme provides a unified and equitable public health offer for all babies, children, and young people, regardless of setting. Furthermore, we provide all Flying Start children and families with access to enhanced health visiting and support with speech, language and communication. Flying Start health visitors work in partnership with families, communities, and other professionals to promote key public health messages and play a vital role in positively influencing health outcomes for our future generations.
• We have published a new unified operating model to underpin the existing school nursing frameworks in Wales. The operating model will effectively extend the current Healthy Child Wales Programme by extending the universal public health offer to all compulsory school-aged children, regardless of setting. The NHS in Wales has two years to fully implement the model across Wales.

In Wales we also believe in the importance of taking preventative action for the health of the nation. Specific examples include:

• Our national oral health programme Designed to Smile has been in place for over a decade. It is targeted at schools and nurseries in disadvantaged areas, working with families and young children aged 0 to 7 to establish good oral health habits. The school/nursery element of the programme has two elements – supervised toothbrushing and the application of fluoride varnish. In 2022-23 academic year more than 1,000 schools and nurseries provided the toothbrushing programme with nearly 51,000 children participating. Also, more than 190,000 toothbrushing packs were distributed by schools, nurseries, and health visitors.
• An important part of our National Immunisation Framework, is our ambition to maximise uptake of childhood vaccinations, to not only protect against severe illness but also reduce health inequalities and provide each child with the best start in life.
• Our 10-year strategy for preventing and reducing obesity Healthy Weight Healthy Wales has a strong focus on the early years and childhood.

We are also making improvements to services, for example:

• Our draft mental health and wellbeing strategy sets out our vision for the next 10 years and includes a focus on improving the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people. This consultation closed on 11 June and the final strategy and delivery plan will be published later this year.
• The transition and handover between children’s and adult healthcare services is a critical period for young people, which requires careful management to ensure continuity of care and services. In 2022, we published new guidance on the arrangements that should be in place to ensure children and young people are supported and move between services in an inclusive and seamless way.
• The NHS Executive is establishing a National Strategic Clinical Network for Children’s Health, and a National Clinical Lead for Children’s Health has recently been appointed.