Part of 3. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 3:06 pm on 1 March 2017.
It’s not an odd way of asking at all. It’s asking for your assessment of where we are. I would have liked to hear a much stronger message in terms of ‘there must be much more improvement’. Those figures for Wales—74.1 per cent seen within four hours—I’ll remind you that, in England, the figure was 82 per cent, the worst performance in 13 years, seen as a scandal and a crisis in England. Of course there’s room for improvement in Wales.
We’ve discussed, of course, the importance of primary care and social care in helping relieve pressure on A&E on many occasions before. I’d like to focus on the role of general practitioners in providing urgent appointments. I’d like, on the record here, to send my sympathies to the family of Ellie-May Clark, whose case was reported over the weekend. Without getting into the specifics of this case, it’s clear that such a case is not going to help the perception that we’ve all heard, at times, that it’s difficult to get appointments with GPs. Now, yesterday, the older people’s commissioner released a report highlighting the barriers many people face in accessing the GP, with those perceptions about the difficulty of being seen very prominent in that report. Of course, lack of real data means that we don’t really know if perception matches reality, but one result certainly is that, if the perception is there, more people are going to go to A&E; we know the pressures on A&E. One way to address that perception, of course, would be to collect and publish more data on waiting times for the GP. Do you accept that we need performance data on availability of appointments and waiting times for a GP in order to tackle those perceptions?