Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: Thank you very much. That was excellent; well done. I think it is important. I hope you have listened to the speech, which demonstrates that we have indeed been very proactive during the summer months in preparing. Obviously, we've never seen anything like the demand that we've encountered over this winter. When it comes to care homes, I think it is important that we pay tribute to the...
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: Thanks very much, Alun. Certainly, I think there are major, major challenges for the NHS. It's important that we recognise and talk about them and that that's a conversation we need with the public. This is not something that should remain in this Chamber, because these are going to be really tough decisions that everyone's going to have to live with. So, if you think about the opportunities...
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: Thank you very much. First of all, I think it is important to recognise not just what we've done, but what we intend to do. And you're quite right, just to give you some ideas of where we're going to be going next, we're going to be making sure that we try and expand the number of hours that those urgent primary care centres are open, so that will divert more people out of those normal hours....
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: Well, thanks very much, Russell, and a happy new year to you as well. Just in terms of how we compare to England, and I think it's really important, let's look at the figures here, because the Nuffield Trust—this is not us as a Welsh Government—the Nuffield Trust tells us that we spend more on health and care than they do in England, okay? So, if you look at the figures in Wales, we are...
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: We’ve also made significant investments in urgent and emergency care this year, and if we hadn’t, the situation would be a great deal worse. Thanks to early investment made available in June, the Welsh ambulance service has been able to deliver a range of actions to increase capacity ahead of the winter. This includes recruitment of 100 additional front-line staff, who will be responding...
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: Diolch yn fawr, Llywydd. Thank you for the opportunity to update Members on NHS winter pressures. Members will appreciate this winter is proving to be particularly challenging for health and care services across the United Kingdom. This is our third winter of living with COVID. While we knew respiratory viruses would become more prevalent this year, the disruption of seasonal patterns has...
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: Diolch yn fawr. Well, I absolutely understand the concern of parents in these very difficult times. When your child is ill and you know that there's a potential that they could get invasive strep A, then you understand why we've seen a huge increase in contact numbers. I think we had 18,000 calls on the weekend, and 54 per cent of the call activity on Sunday related to children who were under...
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: Thank you. We are working closely with the UK Government, the makers and wholesalers in order to hasten the movement of additional stock in the supply chain as a result of the significant increase in demand. We are also working with health boards and community pharmacists to ensure that stock is available for distribution where demand is highest.
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: Thank you. I'm sure that Adam Price will have understood by now that part of the problem in getting people into the hospital is that we can't get them out. So, there are over 1,000 people in our hospitals who shouldn't be there. Part of the problem is because people can't be recruited in local government to work in the care services. So, that inter-relationship is something that everyone...
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: The steps taken to reduce waiting time in A&E and to reduce ambulance response times include creating more ambulance capacity, delivering clinical streaming services, using virtual ward models and enhancement of same-day emergency care services.
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: I think there are different models that are appropriate to different areas of Wales. So, one of the things that I saw when I visited Hwb Iechyd Eifionydd was very good work by paramedics. So, what they did was to send local paramedics in—advanced paramedics—and they could help very many patients, which meant that they then didn't need to go hospital. So, the most important thing for me is...
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: Ambulance response time performance is not where we, the NHS or the public would like it to be. We have a national ambulance improvement plan in place, supported by over £3 million of Welsh Government funding. This features national and local actions to support improvement, including in Dwyfor Meirionnydd.
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: Thanks very much, Altaf. I think I've responded to a letter from you on this, so I'm surprised that you haven't received that yet, so I'll chase that up immediately after this. But I think what was important for some of the things that came out of that cancer summit meeting was the need to make sure we do a lot more straight to test, so you cut out some of the waiting time, because,...
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: Thanks very much, Huw, and can I thank you for the work that you and the CPG are doing on this really important area? Because one of the key things that we are conscious of all of the time in relation to health is inequality. So, why is it that some people are getting very different treatment? And obviously there's a link with deprivation, and we need to make sure that we're addressing that....
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: I need the answer. [Laughter.] Thank you. I expect the cancer services action plan—the NHS’s response to our policy expectations set out in 'The quality statement for cancer'—to be published at the end of January in the run-up to World Cancer Day.
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: Thanks very much. I think that what's really important is that we keep on remembering how many people are actually helped on a monthly basis. What's really interesting for me—. Obviously, I get a lot of people coming up to me and complaining about their waiting times. But I also get a lot of people coming up to me saying what an absolutely magnificent job the NHS is doing for them. And I...
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: Thank you. Of course, I understand why people might feel that that is a system—
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: Thank you. We understand that people are fed up in having to wait so long. Carpal tunnel syndrome is something that an orthopaedic surgeon has to be involved in. I think that it is important that we monitor how much work the orthopaedic surgeons do. It's very important that we continue with this work. We had another meeting recently with the British specialist in orthopaedic surgery to ensure...
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: I am pleased to see that the longest waiting times for treatment at Betsi Cadwaladr have fallen and are 21 per cent lower than they were in March 2022. As part of targeted intervention, they are receiving support from the planned care recovery and improvement team to ensure that they are able to plan their elective care effectively.
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan: Thanks very much. You're absolutely right to highlight the incredible pressure on the emergency services at the moment. As you say, we've seen, this October, the number of red immediately life-threatening calls the highest on record—77 per cent more than in October 2019. This is huge compared to what we've seen before. We have done a huge amount of investment, we've put huge support in...
