8. Will the Minister make a statement on what steps he is taking to improve health services in South Wales Central? OAQ(5)0089(HWS)

We continue to work with all the health boards and trusts in the South Wales Central area to improve standards. This includes strong governance, leadership and performance management systems, the monitoring of incidents and concerns, quality improvement initiatives like our 1000 Lives Improvement programme and, of course, the robust inspection of services.

Thank you for that answer, Cabinet Secretary. I’m sure you, like me, would have been pretty horrified by the number of ambulances that are outside the A&E department at the University Hospital of Wales and the pressure that puts on the staff and the concern it puts in patients’ minds. I know I’ve asked for an urgent question on this particular matter because the issues around the A&E department are ongoing in Cardiff, around staffing issues. What measures are you taking to work with Cardiff and Vale to make sure that those pressures are alleviated, especially as we go into the busy Christmas period because it cannot be acceptable to have that many ambulances parked outside an A&E department, which are basically off call and unable to do the job that they’re doing around South Wales Central, of bringing people into our hospitals when they have an emergency.

I thank the Member for the follow-up question. On ambulances, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that we have a much improved service compared to where we were two years ago. But it’s part of a whole healthcare system: those that don’t need to call for an ambulance could be safely and properly treated within primary care—potentially going back to Choose Pharmacy; we still have relatively minor ailments arriving in our emergency departments—and what then happens to make sure people, if they do need to be in hospital, are safely transferred in a timely manner into the hospital setting, and, also, that they’re then able to leave hospital safely and go back into the community as well. So, it isn’t just one part of the system we’re concerned with.

I think the photos of ambulances outside A&E departments always raise an element of interest, but I’m much more interested in how long does it take to safely transfer someone to the next point of their care, and the necessary part of the care journey. So, how long does it take a large number of ambulances to offload their patients to make sure they get into where they need to be and for those ambulances to then be released into the system? So, this is work that we’ve undertaken. Actually, there’s much more scrutiny on this since we’ve introduced the new model because of the quarterly figures that highlight the number of lost ambulance hours on handover. So, there’s been guidance sent to the whole healthcare system about improving handover, taking on board the excellence and the best practice in Cwm Taf within the South Wales Central area. So, there are a range of improvement actions and there’s no complacency about it. We expect there to be more challenge within the winter period, as you would expect in every part of the healthcare system, but I am confident that, over the next year, we’ll still see continuing improvement and scrutiny and challenge within the system as we understand more of what needs to work. If we don’t look at it as a whole healthcare system itself, then I think we’ll have the wrong answers at the wrong time and we’ll just transfer the pressures to different parts of the system. So, I think we have the right approach, but let’s not pretend this will be easy. The hardest part of the job is not for me as a politician; it’s for people working on the front line in very real and very difficult circumstances.