Minister, thank you very much for your statement today. The first point I would like to concur with you on is to show appreciation to the staff who help maintain our NHS services during the winter, when, I think we all recognise, there do seem to be extraordinary pressures, and I would like to pay my tribute to them as well.

This is a pretty upbeat statement, and I’m quite sure it reflects extremely your hopes for us dealing with the winter pressures, but I have to tell you, Minister, it does not reflect the evidence that we’ve been hearing throughout our committee sessions. So, a couple of key points I’d like to ask you about: you talk about having a range of positive actions planned to improve further resilience. Have you been utterly satisfied that the health boards have put this in place? Because when we’ve talked to GPs and we’ve talked to various A&E clinicians, the royal colleges, et cetera, they are less convinced that there has been a fully integrated discussion about how we can handle winter pressures. So, I’d like to be assured that you are reassured that our health boards have really got this taped, because, as I say, it does not reflect what we’ve been hearing.

I’m interested to understand, Cabinet Secretary, where the staff are coming from, where these extra beds are coming from. You talk about more beds in hospitals perhaps being opened up for the winter pressures, you talk about community beds, but there’s been a real slide in the number of beds in both hospitals and within the community, and I would like to understand how that is going to be rectified in such a short space of time, given that winter is just about here. An example I would give you is that there’s been a 30 per cent decline in the number of district nurses. So, how are we going to be able to keep people in the community and out of hospital, being looked after by GPs and being looked after by other services?

You talk about an overall downward trend in delayed transfers of care, but, Minister, every month, there are about 450 people waiting in hospitals for social care packages to be put into place so that they can escape a hospital confine and continue with their lives. How do you square that number we’ve already got in July, August, September, October—and that’s before we get into winter pressures—when, as you’ve acknowledged yourself, the case mix changes quite dramatically and we have far more older, more frail, and more vulnerable people and, of course, a lot more young children entering into hospital with acute needs?

Could you please, perhaps, explain how we’re going to be able to catch up with that shortfall, given that there’s also a social worker shortage? Because everything in your statement sounds absolutely great, but we all know that we are struggling to get enough staff into the health system, and I just can’t quite see how they suddenly managed to pull the rabbit out of the hat and this is going to work brilliantly well for the next three or four months.

May I also ask you if you have tasked the health boards with looking at developing more the idea of having acute clinicians in charge of specific departments such as orthopaedics, such as paediatrics, able to divert people from A&E to take the pressure off? Because the evidence appears to show that we can divert about 30 per cent of people away from A&E into GP out-of-hours—but, again, all of these services only function if they have the social workers on call, if they have the physiotherapists, if they’ve got the mental health workers to support.

So, great statement, very positive and upbeat, I appreciate you’ve had the discussions with the health boards, but I really find it hard to swallow that there’s been this massive change in the hospital regimes and the community services that we have available, with the shortages of staff we have, that’s going to enable us to cruise through the winter in a way that I fear the health boards may hope that they can do. After all, we’ve been here every single year, talking about winter pressures. Experience is beginning to outweigh hope on this, and we do want to come up with some solutions that are utterly sustainable for the future. Thank you.