Vaughan Gething: Okay. On the £40 million, it's been issued to local government to support the social care sector. I would expect that those people who have care commissioned through the national health service will find they're having the appropriate support for their businesses as well. I'm happy to take up a further conversation with her. I know that our lead director here on social care and integration...
Vaughan Gething: Thank you, Mick, and I think it's important to acknowledge that Members may or may not have seen reports of an inquest that opened today of a very young child who had passed away after their mother passed away, with COVID-19 being I think the primary cause of the death of the mother. And whilst not the primary cause of death of the very young child, I think the child was just a few days old....
Vaughan Gething: Thank you for the questions. I'll try to get through them as quickly as I can, Llywydd. On pandemic preparations, we'll have lots of lessons to learn on the back of this. Our primary preparations were for a flu-style pandemic, but this is a slightly different form of pandemic. We'll have lots of lessons to learn. We're learning as we go, and the way that we're not just stocking but restocking...
Vaughan Gething: Thank you. As I said before, and I guess I'll have the opportunity to say this on every single occasion I come here, when the evidence changes, if the advice changes, the Government will be happy to reconsider its position on any of the areas of activity we're undertaking. That includes the developing evidence base on asymptomatic testing in care homes. We made a move on changing our policy...
Vaughan Gething: In terms of the strategy document, it's similar to the strategy document that Scotland published, in the sense that it's a public-facing strategy document to give an explanation of the strategy we're going to follow, about what the ask is of the public and how our whole system is gearing up to deliver that. There will, of course, be a detailed operational plan that's in development between...
Vaughan Gething: Yes. Thank you for the follow-up questions. On cancer, actually, we had better waiting times relative to England before lockdown took place and, of course, we'd also introduced the new single cancer pathway, which is a more honest measure of waits within the system, and it's been widely welcomed both by clinicians and the campaigning third sector. So, actually, on cancer, we're in,...
Vaughan Gething: Thank you to Angela Burns for the series of questions. I'll try to go through them briefly. Yes, we do have a director, a senior civil servant, who's been empowered with oversight, not just within the Government but the Welsh Government needs to co-ordinate and lead the system to make sure that the test, trace, protect programme actually works and that everyone buys into it and understands...
Vaughan Gething: I issued a written statement last week to alert Members to the new operating framework that I issued to assist NHS organisations to focus and plan in quarter 1. The framework described four levels of harm: harm from COVID-19 directly itself; harm from overwhelming the NHS and social care system; harm from reduction in non-COVID activity; and harm from wider societal actions that may flow from...
Vaughan Gething: Diolch, Llywydd. Members will know that I committed to provide regular updates about the COVID-19 developments here in Wales. We can see from the data that, thankfully, admissions to hospital, the number of people in critical care and the number of people who are sadly still losing their lives to the virus have been falling. We're not yet sufficiently far along the curve to be able to further...
Vaughan Gething: Well, this should be the point about the current focus on testing, and that's about critical workers and people who are symptomatic. That should still work within the healthcare system, so if GPs have patients they're concerned about and there's a clinical reason to do so, that should still be possible. We're also then talking about the broader roll-out of testing as part of the test, track,...
Vaughan Gething: Again, I need to start by reminding the Member, as he knows, that the report that he's referring to is a leaked draft report and not the final plan, so I don't intend to run around looking at assumptions that underpin that, because, when there is a final plan that the Government introduces, I'll then be talking about how we've arrived at those figures, having had that conversation across the...
Vaughan Gething: Thank you for the statement and the series of questions within it. I think it's important to go back to what this leaked draft document is, and it's not a final plan for Wales, it's the basis of a discussion between partners. Because Public Health Wales, as the draft has been leaked, have had to engage in a wider conversation with partners in the health service—so, health boards and other...
Vaughan Gething: Thank you for the question. Members will be aware that Public Health Wales has developed a high-level document to inform discussions with partners on the next phase of our national response to COVID-19. Discussions are ongoing this week to finalise the operational elements of a public protection response plan for Wales.
Vaughan Gething: Thank you, Llywydd. Thank you to the Members who have contributed to the debate. Perhaps it's worth setting out that we have taken unprecedented steps to protect public health from the risk of coronavirus, and even though we have been successful in preventing a much wider and more catastrophic spread of coronavirus, this is still not over and it is certainly not trivial, with more than 1,000...
Vaughan Gething: Thank you, Llywydd. I formally move the two sets of regulations before us today. I do want to address at the outset a brief drafting issue with the motions because, Llywydd, shortly before this debate it was brought to my attention that the motions before us contain an error. The motions refer to draft regulations, but these regulations have quite clearly already been made, and it is the...
Vaughan Gething: On the point about non-COVID-19 deaths rising, we need to understand what exactly that is, whether there is an issue in COVID-19 not being recorded—because, actually, the death certificate review is the most accurate review—whether there's a time lag and whether those figures are provided by the Office for National Statistics. It's also the point that I've made both in my statement and...
Vaughan Gething: I thank the Member for the question. This is an important and positive development in our growing evidence and research base about what we're able to do. The test that the University of South Wales have been involved in developing provides a rapid test result, and so we're looking to roll that out. It could be very helpful in both point-of-care testing but also home testing as well, and I'm...
Vaughan Gething: Well, as the Member has heard on a regular basis throughout not just this afternoon but on a number of other occasions, the evidence we currently have does not support general testing of people who are asymptomatic. If that evidence base changes and under specific circumstances or generally, then I'll be happy to shift the position of myself and the Government. And it's really important that...
Vaughan Gething: Well, as I said, this has been dealt with in some detail by the First Minister, but I hope that the report that I published yesterday provides Jack Sargeant with the sort of certainty that he's understandably looking for. I think it is important to reflect that this wasn't simply a matter of people saying that it was the north Wales health board that got it all wrong. That isn't what...
Vaughan Gething: Well, I'm pleased to hear the oxygen flow issues are being addressed and are being highlighted, and that's, of course, important. It's partly, though, because of the flexing up of critical care capacity and the much greater use of oxygen, and so the flow that's required has obviously increased. That's not a surprise when we think about what's happening. In terms of investing in that work...
