Angela Burns: First Minister, as you’re aware, social prescribing is highly dependent on the third sector, the community organisations and voluntary groups. However, many rural communities have faced consistent downgrading of community assets and the support networks. How will the Welsh Government, the health boards, and local government work effectively together to ensure that community assets are in...
Angela Burns: First Minister—I keep calling you First Minister; this must be an indication. Cabinet Secretary, you said again just then about delivering what the people of Wales need. And, frankly, we don’t deliver what the people of Wales need on health, on mental health. How many of us here have always talked about child and adolescent mental health services? We know that there are an awful lot of...
Angela Burns: That was a nice slide away from my question, actually, Cabinet Secretary, because I asked about the 12 per cent spend as a percentage, and you immediately replied by saying that the services for mental health are the biggest line. But that’s exactly my point. We have cardiac lines, we have diabetes lines within the health budget, but we’ve put everything into mental health. So, yes, you...
Angela Burns: Diolch, Lywydd. Cabinet Secretary, between 2009 and 2014, NHS expenditure on mental health ranged from 11.4 per cent to 11.9 per cent of the total NHS spend. Now, given that mental health budget lines are a catch-all for everything from child and adolescent mental health services to dementia, psychotic illnesses, perinatal services, depression and anxiety, do you believe that 12 per cent of...
Angela Burns: Cabinet Secretary, would you please outline to us the chain of command in terms of decisions and sign-offs that applies in relation to the use of public money in driving forward economic development? I’d be interested to understand clearly from you your view on who deploys it, obviously from Welsh Government on down through the chain of command, who signs off and conducts the due diligence...
Angela Burns: Minister, thank you for your statement today. I’ve got four areas of questioning I’d like to raise with you. The first thing I’d like to talk about is co-production—this has become a watchword for many organisations, including the Welsh Government and the NHS. I would like to understand better what you’re going to be able to do with all these disparate plans to ensure that...
Angela Burns: First Minister, given that recent reports have suggested we should have 88 epilepsy nurses in Wales and we’ve currently got nine, and given the difficulties we have in recruiting people, I’m not going to ask you to go and find 81 extra nurses overnight. However, what we could do is run specialised epilepsy clinics on a more frequent basis. Scotland has five such clinics for just over 5...
Angela Burns: No, I won’t, thank you, Joyce. The ultimate woolly aspiration—your promise to hold a wider conversation about local government reform. So, are you saying that, despite the months of effort, and tonnes of wordage produced by the Williams Commission, and the First Minister personally championing local government reform in the last Assembly, this new programme for government firmly places...
Angela Burns: This has certainly been a curate’s egg of a debate, and I do think that the Welsh Conservatives have managed to snaffle all the good parts, because I do think that most of the other contributions were pretty thin, particularly the Welsh Government, who only managed to find one backbencher to defend their programme. Leader of the house, I understand that the May election result must have...
Angela Burns: [Continues.]—in such as detail as you do there, it would be an absolute waste of our time.
Angela Burns: Will you take an intervention?
Angela Burns: I just wanted to briefly intervene, because you’ve made this comment—David has, I think probably Rhun has, and I’m quite sure the Minister will—but, to be frank, we all buy into devolution, do we not? So, if a devolved nation, i.e. England, chooses to get rid of bursaries, who cares? That’s what they want to do. I don’t agree with that, but I don’t quite get this fact that we...
Angela Burns: Yes, and I thought you made some really good points in your contribution, which I think could be easily wound into the inquiry. I have to say that I stop slightly short at the notion of paying a wage to all trainee nurses, because, then, do we pay a wage to trainee doctors and dentists and vets? I think we have to look at what we can do to support people in an equitable and fair way. And, we...
Angela Burns: I’m very pleased to hear this debate being brought forward today by Plaid Cymru because it very much follows on from many of the debates we’ve had—it follows on from our debate last week about workforce planning. We have such a crisis in our workforce planning throughout all strata that I think that this adds to it. We will be supporting this motion. I did think about adding an...
Angela Burns: I certainly am. My final comment to him was that I will, certainly—and it may be something other Assembly Members may wish to bear in mind—be furnishing him with a number of case studies, because I think that will be another way of getting the patient voice to be heard loud and clear.
Angela Burns: Not yet. Probably shortly, but not quite yet. I’m really pleased by the way you’ve set this up. We’ve had a number of conversations, with Rhun, with Caroline, between us. I’m really pleased with the collaborative manner in which you’ve approached this. I’m really pleased that we’ve been involved. But above all, I’m really pleased about two things. One is the absolute...
Angela Burns: Minister, thank you for this statement. I’m very pleased to welcome both elements of it on behalf of the Welsh Conservatives. I do have a couple of questions to ask, though, and I’d like to turn in the first instance to the new treatment fund that you speak of here. You have said previously that the new treatment fund has been developed from Welsh Government experiences of managing...
Angela Burns: First Minister, winter pressures haunt us every year: we have these kinds of conversations and it’s always the same groups of people—the elderly, the young and the chronically ill. However, in Pembrokeshire, the community resource teams, which are a joint collaboration between the health board and local government, have been incredibly effective in working together to ensure that people...
Angela Burns: First Minister, I also share the admiration mentioned here for the jobs that our health and social care professionals undertake throughout the country. The multidisciplinary approach provided to patients by doctors working closely with such professionals has proven to be very effective, particularly in the health boards where they have a director of therapy and health sciences on their...
Angela Burns: Thank you for that. I did listen to your answer to Gareth Bennett that you set the priorities and local government are charged with implementing them as they see fit in their local area. However, Minister, I would like to understand what ability you have to influence the fair deployment of funding throughout a local authority. One of the cinderella services ends up being enforcement. Local...
