I thank the Member for his final series of questions. I think it’s really important that we separate out the right model for the right form of specialist care, wherever that is across the country, when we focus on north Wales, and in particular on Bangor, so that we don’t just have an argument about one site and one geographic centre. The danger there is that we play the three centres against each other and that’s really not helpful. We have to understand what the very best clinical evidence and advice tells us about what should be a specialist service, what that conversation should or should not be, and then what we can expect in terms of outcomes for the patient as a result. What we do know is that, where those specialist services are created, they’re more likely to recruit staff into them in a sustainable pattern.

So, part of the challenge is not simply about saying, ‘This isn’t broken, so we’re not going to fix it’, because that just means that you wait for a service to fall over before you actually make change and you ignore all the evidence and advice around it, and that can’t be the right way to plan and deliver healthcare in any part of our country. So, that is not what we are prepared to do. And it is not what I expect health boards to do. I expect health boards, in meeting the needs of their local population, to be properly aware of all the evidence and advice of the different services that they have that develop their own place and understanding that their duty is to provide the very best healthcare for their local population. That will mean that the way that some services are delivered will need to change. Not to do that would be to fail the responsibilities that they have to the local population.

We will see a different pattern of services in primary care, in secondary care and tertiary care across this next five years. It’s important that we do, because, otherwise, we simply pretend that running the current model of care, in five years’ time, is going to meet the needs of our population, it’s going to make sure we recruit the right staff in the right place and deliver the right care. Then, we’d be fooling ourselves and we’d be poorly serving our public. I’m not prepared to do that and nor should health boards be. That is not the lead that I’m giving as the Cabinet Secretary for health and I expect other people who really want the health service to succeed, to join that debate in a much more open-minded way and to think again about the quality of care that we’re providing. Service quality and service outcomes drive what I want to see and they should drive what all of us want to see within the health service here in Wales.