Part of 2. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 2:40 pm on 15 June 2016.
I thank the Member for his second question on the area. On this, there are two points that I would make: the first is that in some of the areas on diagnostics where we have waits, it is tied up in workforce. So, there are challenges for us, for example, in training more sonographers in Wales. Where they’re currently trained, you tend to see better outcomes. For example, Swansea and west Wales do better on this than the south-east of Wales and lots of the training is undertaken in Swansea. So, that shouldn’t be a surprise. There’s something about our workforce planning and understanding where and how we train more members of staff, as well as attracting people to come into the country.
The second point that I’d make is that, in terms of the attention given to it, it isn’t really about the headlines because, again, from my previous role and into this one, it is something that I regularly discussed with health board chairs and chief executives and there was certainly no lack of focus on the need to see improvement. That’s what we saw in the last half of the last year. I’m really, really clear with health boards and the public that I expect to see further improvement. There’s something about understanding how we improve our headline rates in the here and now and what we need to do to improve the system that lies underneath it—so, improving diagnostic treatment and where that should take place, because you make a fair point in that some of these could take place within primary care. That is what we have to do at the same time. They’re not necessarily easy things to do: to maintain headline performance at an acceptable level and to reform the system, which does mean making some difficult and, at time, imperfect choices, but it is absolutely what I expect the service to do.