I would like to thank the Welsh Conservatives for bringing forward this debate. It’s very welcome. Also, I’d like to commend the NHS staff for the work that they do, often under very difficult circumstances. Problems with the recruitment and retention of front-line staff, clinicians in particular, have been well documented in recent years. Staff shortages have led to increased workloads, which have become unmanageable for many frontline staff. Unmanageable workloads have affected staff morale, led to an increase in stress-related illness and forced many clinicians to leave the field altogether. Nowhere is this more evident than in general practice. Some GPs have seen their caseloads double in recent years with practices unable to recruit GPs. A GP seeing 80 patients during a consultation is now not unheard of. These unmanageable workloads have led many GPs to quit general practice altogether, thus compounding the problem. The Royal College of General Practitioners states that we need to recruit an additional 400 GPs over the next four years as we are failing to fill the training places we already have.

The Welsh Government must be more creative when it comes to recruiting clinicians. We must incentivise clinicians to train and work in Wales. The recruitment of Welsh-speaking staff is also important to cope with patients who can only speak Welsh and perhaps are suffering, as Rhun said, from dementia. Above all, we must incentivise clinicians to stay in Wales. According to the Royal College of Physicians there is a distinct lack of research undertaken to understand the drivers for recruitment and retention.

Decisions on future medical recruitment strategies are not based on robust evidence. It is therefore imperative that we collect more data to assist us with future recruitment campaigns. But we mustn’t only focus on front-line staff, as important as it is. The NHS is Wales’s biggest employer with around 72,000 people working in it. There are just under 6,000 hospital clinicians and 2,000 GPs working in NHS Wales. Without the vast number of nurses, scientific, therapeutic and technical staff, patients could not be treated. Without the administration and support staff our hospitals and GP surgeries wouldn’t be able to function. So, we cannot recruit more clinicians without ensuring that there are sufficient staff to make the appointments, conduct the diagnostic tests, transport patients and nurse patients back to health. They need to ensure that there are sufficient staff across the NHS to cope with the increasing demands on services.

So, future workforce planning in the NHS has not—and the Welsh Government has to ensure that there are sufficient resources put into workforce planning otherwise we will be having the same discussion in another five years.

UKIP will be supporting the motion today because there is a crisis in GP recruitment and we could soon be facing a crisis in other clinical fields.

We also ask about the possibility—because when people go to be trained as a doctor they have to have eight A* GCSEs and at the moment we are asking that—when we’ve spoken to some doctors who are currently, say, in their forties or fifties, many have said that they would struggle to achieve these grades. So, we’re wondering if the emphasis could be put perhaps on the A –level grades as opposed to the eight A*s. This doesn’t mean putting down, but just ensuring that Welsh universities in their pursuit of attracting the brightest students in the world don’t put Welsh students at a disadvantage. Cardiff are asking for eight A*s, and GCSE results, we feel, shouldn’t have as much bearing as long as the student has the requisite A-levels. Perhaps Cardiff could re-envisage this qualification. I look forward to the Cabinet Secretary’s reply and his plans for tackling NHS recruitment. Thank you.