Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:08 pm on 27 September 2016.
We do; the Choose Well campaign has been doing that for many years and, indeed, there’s an app available for people who want to access it. We encourage people to look, in the first place, at a pharmacist, then to look at a community nurse, and then to think about the GP. It’s quite right to say to people, ‘Don’t default to the A&E department first or, indeed, to a GP first.’ So, that’s already in train. In terms of out-of-hours, it’s available in our DGHs and elsewhere. The issue in the winter is not the numbers of people coming through A&E, but the conditions that they have: there are many more, older people with respiratory conditions that are more complex, who need more time in A&E and, ultimately, admission. Last year, the preparedness plans worked well. It can be difficult, of course, to predict the demand on the NHS in the winter because of the weather, basically. But, nevertheless, we scrutinise the preparedness of each local health board to make sure that we can be satisfied that they are ready for the winter.