Part of 2. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 2:41 pm on 29 March 2017.
I couldn’t agree with you more that this is an issue that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency. It’s more than just the individual. Yesterday, we had a long discussion about the deficits that we are seeing in the Welsh NHS in some of our trusts. We know that we have a recruitment issue—we can’t get enough doctors, nurses and all the other staff. We also know that, for example, the cost of bank nurses who are on contracts for over a year is extraordinarily high, as is the cost of locum doctors and consultants. We know that health boards are not recruiting secretarial staff when they’re about to leave until after they’ve gone, which of course puts consultants and doctors really far behind because they can’t get the notes out on all the patients that they see, and it’s creating a real logjam. If we could just bring some of those hours back into play through adequate support for those individuals, then that would have an enormous financial and medical benefit for the NHS.
These statistics, in comparison to the English statistics, are pretty damning. You just mentioned ambulance staff, but the latest figures that are available, which are July to September 2016, show a rate of 7.5 per cent of staff off in Wales, compared to only 5.4 per cent of staff off in England. This gap’s been similar over the last five years.
Cabinet Secretary, in England, they’ve been piloting a rapid access to treatment system. I wonder if I can persuade you to start having a good look at this. I have discussed it with some of the health boards. This is not about trying to develop a two-tier NHS, and I want to make that absolutely crystal-clear, but given our lack of financial resource in the NHS, and given the difficulty that we have in replacing staff and recruiting staff to the NHS, it seems to be really imprudent not to try to encourage the NHS staff that we have to come back into work sooner rather than later. It’s good for them. You said it yourself: it’s great to support them. There are some good lessons to be learnt over the border and I’d like to see that you are big enough to be able to accept that there are other home nations that have tackled this in different ways. Let’s see if we can bring some of that best practice over here and get some of our hard-working staff back into the saddle, because we need them and they need to be back in their jobs, earning a good salary, and feeling much better themselves.