Thank you for the comments and questions. In terms of your opening comments, I don’t accept your assessment that there’s not much mention of social care. Social care is crucial to the whole system working. It isn’t just about social workers within hospitals—when you think about the ICF and the way that works, that’s got to be a partnership with social care. And, in your own constituency, the specific example I mentioned of the Ynys Môn enhanced care only works because you’ve got social care, advanced nurse practitioners and GPs working together. And, in fact, consultants in Ysbyty Gwynedd are very, very positive about the scheme, because they recognise the real benefits it brings. There are similar schemes around the country that only work because you have that whole-system partnership taking place, and that’s what we need to see more of throughout the year, as well as, of course, at the heightened demand point of winter.

To deal with your point about summer and winter demand and whether we’ve got the right capacity, well, the demand profile is different. There are more numbers in the summer, but, actually, the profile of patients coming in in the winter means that, actually, they’re more likely to take up space in a hospital, because it’s more likely to be the right choice for them, and they’re more likely to stay for longer as well, because we do know they’re more likely to be older people who are sicker and who have a more complex basket of conditions to be addressed. So, that’s why we know the pressure is entirely different in winter, even though the numbers themselves are reduced. So, that’s why we look at surge capacity within the acute care system. That’s a sensible thing to plan for in the way you have the balance between unscheduled and planned care in the winter as well: the balance changes. But also it’s why I made mention of the step-up and step-down facility. Some of this is about using our suite of community hospitals, but it’s also about more intelligent commissioning capacity within the residential care sector. We could and should do more progressively with the independent sector to look at what capacity exists and to make sure it works for both health and social care, and about how we spend that public money, as it may be a more appropriate place for someone to recover outside of a hospital if they’re medically fit for discharge.

That brings me to your final point—I’ll jump back to pharmacy—about keeping people in if it’s the right clinical choice. I don’t have very many instances at all where people write to me and they say, ‘My relative or I should have stayed longer in a hospital bed: that was the right place for me’. It’s almost always people saying, ‘I wanted to go, I was ready to go, but I needed more support to enable me to do that’. And we actually think the biggest problem in delayed transfers of care is patient choice, where people don’t want to leave because the place they want to go isn’t available. That means, of course, they’re occupying a hospital bed where someone with a much greater need isn’t able to access it. There are difficult challenges here, but I don’t think there’s a system-wide challenge for people to be taken out of a hospital before they’re ready. Of course, if that did happen, that would be a concern, but our big system challenge is actually helping to get people out when they’re ready to leave to move to a more appropriate part of the care system, either to have care at home, with support or without, or to have care in a different setting.

Finally, because I won’t ignore the point about pharmacy, we’re not just interested in sore throats. The common ailments scheme that we have is much broader than that, and I expect this winter a rolling-out of the common ailments scheme, of course, enabled by the investment we’ve made in IT infrastructure and the sharing of the GP record.