Part of 3. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 3:08 pm on 25 January 2017.
Yes, I think it’s a really important point about the detail and the data that we do have available to us and how they should be used to drive improvement. Those data should show, actually, for that small number of patients, an improvement around those people could release lots of bed days to make sure other people come through the system and receive care in a more timely manner. We need to understand what is the issue around that small cohort of patients and why they take so long. Is it about complexity, are there more improvements we can make system-wide, is it about clinician-to-clinician improvement as well? So, we always need to understand what the data tell us about that problem and then to understand what the answer to that is, and then to understand what times we expect to see improvement within. Again, it’s why I go back to this: the planned care programme isn’t an optional extra for health boards, it is what I expect them to deliver, and understanding data and understanding clinical agreement and leadership across the country on improving a whole range of these areas, in orthopaedics and ophthalmology in particular, where there are large numbers of people who are waiting—large numbers for whom we can improve their experience and we can also do something about their outcomes, too. So, I’m very interested in seeing that evidence properly deployed by health boards and demonstrating the improvement we all expect to see.