4. Urgent Question: Glan Clwyd Hospital

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:24 pm on 9 November 2016.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 3:24, 9 November 2016

Thank you for that series of points in the follow-up question. As I mentioned earlier in response to your colleague Rhun ap Iorwerth, when he mentioned this particular case, there are challenges about the care provided and the model of care provided, but also, this case highlighted a very real challenge with the unacceptable way in which the complaint itself was dealt with. That’s absolutely part of this as well. I think a lot of the anxiety could have been taken out if the health board had dealt with the complaint in a more timely way, and hadn’t decided to move the complaint to the end of actually receiving a form of care. I don’t think that was acceptable, and I want to be really clear that that should not happen at this health board, or any other, in the future. In terms of the points about the make-up of cancer services and the pressure, some of these are UK-wide pressures and some of them are more localised pressures as well. We know that urology services are under pressure right across the UK, so there is something here about understanding how we have, again, the right form of service. So, that’s something about capital investment and it’s also about a model of care as well.

This really does go to the heart of the point you make about workforce challenges, because I said in response to questions earlier today—and in pretty much every questions I deal with there is almost always a question about the workforce—it’s who we have, whether they’re the right grade, whether we have enough of them, and how we get more staff in what is almost always a really competitive market, not just within the UK, but further afield, too. That’s why having the right models of care really does make a difference. We make it much more difficult to recruit to models of care that are not delivering and are leaving people in a position where the service is unlikely to be seen as sustainable. So, there’s a range of different things that we need to do.

You’ll see action that the Government will take on the way in which we commission places and the way in which we design and deliver the workforce to improve workforce planning in the current weeks and months. That’s long-standing work; decisions will get made on that in the near future. You’ll then see also the work that we’re going to do in terms of the investment we’ll make again in education and training places here within Wales, and the way we support our students, too, as well. It goes with the point your colleague Dai Lloyd made as well about understanding what we need to do to both bring more people in, whether it’s primary care or secondary care, but also to keep the people that we’ve got. There’s a range of different points in all this, and I wouldn’t pretend that there is one simple answer to deal with any of this. The challenge for the Government and the health boards is—and the deanery as well—how do we make sure the environment we create in Wales is one where people are valued, people are respected, and at the same time our high expectations are met, and what we need to do to see the system change positively is to deal with those workforce challenges and to continue to deliver the high-quality care that people, quite rightly, would expect from our national health service.