Cabinet Secretary, thank you for your statement today. I welcome hugely the great strides made forward in the delivery of stroke services. There was much in this report that I found to be of really good news. I do have a couple of questions, though, that spin from it.

The first is that NICE guidelines suggest that patients suffering from stroke should, as you know, start thrombolysis within three hours of arriving at hospital. I’ve submitted an FOI on this to all the health boards, and from the responses I’ve received so far, which is just three of them, they’ve all had, consistently, patients waiting for between three and five hours. I wondered if you could tell me what plans are in place to ensure that these health boards are able to start this treatment within the three-hour window. And if I could just refer back to the debate last week on the Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust, this is entirely the point that I was trying to make about strokes not being in the red category, because my concern is that, if they’ve waited a while out in the field, and then they’re still waiting again whilst they’re in hospital, then by the time they actually have that treatment, they are many, many hours down the road and therefore are less likely to have success.

Just whilst we’re on the recommended guidelines, could you also please make a comment on the Royal College of Physicians’s recent guidelines that say that they believe that all stroke patients should receive a brain scan within one hour, and whether or not you think that we are able to drive towards that?

My second area of questioning concerns strokes in children and babies. Now, I admit they’re rare, but I wondered if there’s been anything specifically done to minimise such occurrences. The framework refers to the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health consulting on stroke-in-childhood clinical guidelines. Could you please provide an indication of when you expect this to be published and how long it might take to implement any recommendations? There obviously needs to be a clear pathway for the treatment of children and babies and, because it is rare, I do accept that it is unrealistic for every health board to have full provision, so I wondered what plans you might be putting in place so that children and babies who suffer strokes can access that very, very vital service.

Finally, the last area I’d like to concentrate on is the inequality agenda—or the equality agenda. According to the ‘State of the Nation’, and the stroke statistics published last year, people from a black or south-Asian background have strokes at a significantly younger age than Caucasian people. Is there anything being done to specifically target healthcare education and preventative measures to those communities? At present, they are being disadvantaged because of the sheer prevalence within their cultural community, or cultural heritage, and it would be really useful to know what Government plans there are to actually tackle that specific area.

Finally, Wales has the highest percentage of people with high blood pressure per population in the UK and, again, I wondered if, as part of the stroke delivery plan, you might be looking to see if there are any updates you can give us on what we might do to drive that down, if anything’s changed in the last 18 months. Thank you very much.