Thank you, Presiding Officer. We believe, as other parties do, that the time is now right for a rounded and mature conversation about how we shape the future of health and social care services here in Wales.

The parliamentary review of health and social care in Wales was agreed as part of our compact, ‘Moving Wales Forward’, with Plaid Cymru. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank not just Plaid Cymru but all parties here for their contribution and co-operation in agreeing the terms of reference and the panel membership, enabling all of us to move this forward.

The panel will review the best available evidence to identify key issues facing our health and social care services and draw out the challenges that these will present over coming years. For example, there are challenges with NHS finances within a reducing Welsh Government budget, workforce planning, recruitment and retention, and meeting the rising demands of healthcare and rising public expectations. The review will examine options for the way forward and will then make recommendations about what the health and care service of the future could look like.

The review team will of course draw on the work that has already been done and carried out in Wales by the Health Foundation, the OECD, the Nuffield Trust, the Bevan Commission and, indeed, the King’s Fund. It will draw their findings together and identify gaps in the evidence and knowledge that the review will seek to fill. The terms of reference have been discussed and agreed with other parties and will be published later today. The panel will also meet to discuss them later this month.

We have all agreed that the review panel should be independent, comprising prominent leaders, stakeholders and academics with a wide range of backgrounds. So, today, I am pleased to announce that Dr Ruth Hussey has agreed to chair the review. Ruth was born in north Wales, is an ex-chief medical officer of Wales, has been regional director of public health at NHS North West and has worked with the Public Health England transition team at the Department of Health. She has also been the director of public health for Liverpool and senior lecturer in public health at Liverpool university.

Ruth brings with her a wealth of experience, a depth of knowledge of the system here in Wales, as well as beyond our border and within the wider view of health and social care. She will be joined on the review panel by: Professor Anne Marie Rafferty, who is the professor of nursing and dean of the Florence Nightingale school of nursing and midwifery at King's College London, and she is also a fellow of the Royal College of Nursing; Professor Keith Moultrie, who is the head of the Institute of Public Care at Oxford Brookes University, has worked directly with the Department of Health and the Department for Education, the Care Quality Commission and the Scottish Joint Improvement Team, and he also has experience of working within Wales; Professor Nigel Edwards, who is the chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, has been an expert adviser to KPMG’s global centre of excellence for health and life Sciences, a senior fellow at the King’s Fund, and has also been the policy director of the NHS Confederation for 11 years; and Dr Jennifer Dixon, the chief executive of the Health Foundation. She was previously the chief executive of the Nuffield Trust from 2008 to 2013 and she has previously been the policy adviser to the chief executive of the national health service.

In order to further widen the perspective, there will also be a business representative on the panel and I will, of course, discuss that position with spokespeople from other parties. There will be three further ex officio members of the panel: Professor Sir Mansel Aylward, chair of the Bevan Commission, professor of public health education at Cardiff University and former chief medical adviser at the Veterans Agency in the Ministry of Defence; Professor Don Berwick, who is a president emeritus and senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He’s a former professor of paediatrics and healthcare policy and currently lecturer in the department of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School, and a leading international authority on healthcare quality and improvement. The final ex officio member is Dame Carol Black, principal of Newnham College Cambridge, a former president of the Royal College of Physicians and of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. This will allow the panel to benefit from their extensive international expertise and experience.

Between them, this panel, therefore, should have the expertise and capability to deliver a comprehensive and independent assessment of how best to tackle the big issues facing us around health and social care. The review team will be supported by a wider stakeholder reference group made up of representatives of professional bodies and social service organisations. I expect the review to take around a year to prepare its report, but I also expect that interim findings could be available before then. This will allow time for recommendations to be discussed, debated and implemented within this Assembly term. And I will, of course, update the Assembly as the work progresses.