8. Will the First Minister make a statement on the shortage of doctors in North Wales? OAQ(5)0164(FM)[W]

Well, as regards the numbers, there isn’t a shortage. There are more doctors now than we had in 2005.

Member of the Senedd:

That’s not true.

Don’t say that it isn’t true; I’ll give you the figures so that the information is correct. In 2005, there were 1,849 GPs in Wales and now there are 1,997. In the Betsi Cadwaladr area, there were 422 in 2005 and 437 in 2015. And the same is true in terms of the significant increase in the number of doctors in hospitals. Having said that, of course, there will be a campaign launched at the end of next month in order to attract more doctors to work in Wales.

Well, I’m not sure if I want to thank you for that response because it’s a very different picture painted if you count the number of doctors that correspond to full-time equivalents. But, the question I wanted to ask you is this: one of the problems with the recruitment of GPs to rural areas is the lack of wider health facilities that are available to them. GPs don’t want to fail in their duties because they can’t access beds for patients, x-ray machines, diagnostic services and so on and so forth. Can I ask you, therefore, would you be willing to commission research with rural GPs, including those perhaps who have given up their posts, to acknowledge their problems in terms of access to local facilities and to take action as a result of that?

I would argue that we’re already doing that through the collaborative group in mid Wales, which has worked extremely well. I would expect the work that has been done there to be work that could be transferred and disseminated throughout the whole of Wales. So, that work has already started.

Thank you, First Minister, for that question. I listened very carefully. One thing that you didn’t refer to, of course, is the innovation in GP care, in particular in north Wales, in terms of the work that’s going on in Prestatyn, with a multi-disciplinary team approach to patient care. What work is the Welsh Government going to do to evaluate whether that model is a successful model that can be applied elsewhere across Wales in order to alleviate the pressure on GP numbers in the country?

He will know—he’s seen it himself—how it works. The reality is that we saw in Prestatyn GP practices—two of them, if I remember rightly—close. But, the local health board took over the provision of primary care services, and the services are better and are certainly wider than what was available before. So, it does show that the contractor model is not always the best model for delivering medical services. For some, that’s what they’ll want; for more GPs, increasingly, it seems to me, the contractor model is less attractive to them. What we’ve seen so far in Prestatyn has been excellent in terms of the width and the depth of the service that’s been provided and, of course, the local health board will continue to evaluate what’s been done there in order to make sure that it’s a model that can be adopted, potentially, around Wales.