Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:59 pm on 13 September 2016.
I thank the Member for her questions and comments. People regularly talk about the morale of staff within the service and the worry about the level of confidence the public has in the health service, and, frankly, that is affected by the way we talk about the service. When you talk about ‘serious failings’ across healthcare in Wales, it is no surprise that the debate is injected with a level of pessimism that does not reflect the reality of the high-quality healthcare that most people experience. Every single patient survey recognises that people have a good experience of healthcare the overwhelming majority of time, whether it’s 92 per cent or 93 per cent, or other figures.
The challenge is what we do about those areas where that is not the case, and how we honestly confront and resolve those areas. That’s what we are focused upon. And in terms of having an independent look and review about healthcare and health and care across Wales, of course we’ve committed to having a parliament that will look at the future of the service. We want to have a sensible and mature conversation about the future of the health service that does not set us back into a fairly hysterical series of accusations and arguments about what is really happening within the NHS, and that will allow us to be sensible and serious about the areas that do require improvement, which is what the targeted intervention measures are about, and does not, as Julie Morgan was making the point, put us into a position where we refuse to recognise those areas of significant and continuing excellence in the health service here in Wales.