It’s a pleasure to participate in this important debate this afternoon and I’m pleased to hear the Conservatives alluding to Plaid Cymru very frequently in their speech this afternoon.

As we’ve already heard from Rhun, there are a number of challenges facing the health service, and very often they are at their most intense in the rural and most deprived areas. It’s quite obvious, and has been for some time, that we need an integrated health and social care system in Wales. We can’t spend time and money battling about who should pay for what and who should do what whilst the person and the family requiring that service are forgotten in the midst of the bureaucratic system.

As a family, we had direct experience of the arguments that arise too often as care plans are established for individuals. We were trying to get my father home at the end of his life. It took quite a bit of energy to move things on, to get agreement about who paid for which element of the care, and many people would have given up. That would have been contrary to my father’s wishes, and he was the patient. It would also have meant significantly higher costs for the health service because, of course, keeping a patient in a hospital bed is much more expensive than looking after them at home. After my father was at last discharged from the hospital, we had a peerless service, with the health service, the voluntary sector, social services and ourselves as a family working together. The problem was before that, namely getting to the point where that collaboration was possible. So, it’s high time that we seriously set about integrating the services in a real way, on the ground, rather than in partnership boards and talking shops.

There are good examples of good practice available—planned services that are patient-centric. There’s one excellent scheme working at the Alltwen Hospital in Gwynedd and it would be good to learn from that experience there and in other places, and, more importantly, to take action on what works well. As the Government looks again at how local government will be reconfigured in future, here’s an excellent opportunity to address this seriously and an excellent opportunity to restructure in a way that truly improves how we provide and deliver services to our people, and that should be at the root of any reorganisation. We are all living longer, which is excellent news, but very often we are living longer whilst facing chronic conditions that need to be controlled and managed outside of hospital, and this, as Rhun has already said, means more services in the primary care sector, including more GPs, more community nurses and coordinated social services.

I mentioned at the outset the challenges facing rural areas, and Rhun has said that we mustn’t use the word ‘crisis’ too lightly. But I am going to use it about the circumstances that exist in some of the areas. There is a real crisis in some areas because of the lack of general practitioners. In Dwyfor, for example, almost half the GPs are about to retire. Plaid Cymru have outlined a number of policies to attract and retain GPs. We do need a long-term plan in order to train doctors, including GPs, in Wales. We need a national solution to expand the provision in Cardiff and Swansea and to create a new medical school in north Wales as part of a pan-Wales plan.

Doctors stay on to work where they have trained—there’s a great deal of evidence to back that statement. The idea of having a north Wales medical school is fast attracting support. I believe that we can create a model of a unique medical school with a focus on rural medicine. Wales can be in the vanguard on this, innovating with the use of new technology and creating new models of rural medical provision. Thank you for allowing me to participate, and I hope that everybody will support the motion.