I’m not a member of the committee but I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to take part in this debate. I’d like to congratulate the committee on its report, and particularly congratulate Margaret Hutcheson and her friends for highlighting ovarian cancer, and, as Hannah Blythyn said, for managing to get it debated here on the floor of the Chamber. So, I think that’s a great step forward in itself.

I’m sure many of you attended the Cancer Patient Voices event earlier this year, back in January. It was the second event of its kind. The first event, the first of its kind in Wales, was organised by Annie Mulholland. Some of you may remember, or may even have known Annie, who was a great campaigner and who appeared frequently in the media and on television drawing attention to issues related to ovarian cancer. She set up the Cancer Patient Voices event to bring together people suffering from all different kinds of cancer. Annie herself was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2011 and, sadly, died in May 2016. But I’d like to pay tribute to the attention and the highlighting that she did at that time. I know she was a member of the cancer cross-party group, which I chair, and she had a mission to highlight and bring to everyone’s attention issues related to cancer.

I congratulate Margaret Hutcheson on bringing this petition and I acknowledge the very strong voices there are on this issue. Many constituents have come to see me asking for screening, asking for the Welsh Government to bring in screening and, at the Voices event earlier this year, there was a persistent call from women and men for a screening programme. I know that the petitioners will be disappointed by the recommendations, because I know that Margaret Hutcheson, herself a retired palliative care nurse, wants yearly screening for ovarian cancer using the CA125 blood test. But my understanding, and the evidence outlined in the Petitions Committee report, shows the danger of false positive results with this test and concludes that however much we may want it to work, there is no evidence to support the introduction of a population screening programme using the CA125 blood test, or an alternative method, at this moment in time. I think we have to accept this decision, which is based on evidence, and so I think the Petitions Committee are right in their recommendations. But I do think it’s absolutely essential that we keep the possibility of screening under review, because science is changing all the time and there are huge advances all the time. So, let’s keep this under review so that we know that if there ever is the opportunity for tackling this disease, we will be in a position to do it.

I agree with Angela Burns and Hannah Blythyn that this should not be called the silent killer, because that implies there is nothing you can do about it. From all the debate that we’ve heard today, there is much that you can do about it. You can recognise the symptoms, GPs can be helped in training with awareness of these issues and the very fact that it has come here today and is being debated, I think, is very, very important.

There was an awareness-raising campaign undertaken by Velindre Cancer Centre in early 2016 and I do welcome that. I welcome the fact that they worked together with Target Ovarian Cancer to distribute GP information packs and to try to make GPs more aware of the symptoms and recognise—because, as I think everyone said today, early diagnosis is the absolute key.

I do think that we need more of these information campaigns and campaigns also to highlight the symptoms to women themselves, which, again, people here have mentioned today. I don’t think we can be too high profile about this issue. It shouldn’t be a one-off awareness-raising campaign, because we know that early diagnosis can cure. So, I’d like to really conclude by saying well done to all those women who’ve made such efforts to highlight this campaign and thank the Petitions Committee for its response.