Diolch. We support this motion’s call for the development of a medical school in Bangor as part of an all-Wales approach to increasing training, recruitment and retention of doctors in Wales. As the Royal College of Physicians states,

Recruitment problems are threatening the existence of many hospitals and general practices in Wales. We need to train more doctors and nurses in Wales with the aim of retaining them to work here.’

But, they said, a third of core medical training places in Wales were unfilled in 2016, with this figure rising to over 50 per cent in Betsi Cadwaladr university health board hospitals.

As the head of Bangor University’s School of Medical Sciences said last week, Wales must expand medical schools to deal with future shortages of doctors, particularly GPs. Relatively few extra academic staff would be needed and Bangor University is an ideal position to foster and recruit students from rural Wales and Welsh-speaking communities.

As the National Pensioners Convention Wales states, adequate access to GP services is essential to maintaining general health and mobility, and, as a consequence, to helping prevent isolation and loneliness, but respondents expressed concern that difficulties with getting appointments in a reasonable time is connected to GP numbers.

As I said here two weeks ago,

It’s many years since I first discussed the need for a Bangor medical school with its previous vice-chancellor…. It’s three years since the North Wales Local Medical Committee warned, at a meeting in the Assembly, that general practice in north Wales was…facing crisis, unable to fill vacancies, with GPs considering retirement.’

And they expressed concern that the previous supply of GPs from Liverpool medical school, where their generation of GPs had primarily come from, had largely been severed.

I therefore asked the First Minister to ensure that the business case for a new medical school in Bangor includes dialogue with Liverpool, to ensure that we keep local medics local. As he replied, what’s hugely important is that any medical school works closely with others in order to ensure that sustainability is there in the future’.

I therefore move amendment 2, calling on the Welsh Government to work with health and education institutions on both sides of the border to build a more in-depth and wide-ranging north Wales medical programme.

Delivering sustainability will require the training, recruitment and retention of doctors locally, and this will require the universities, Betsi Cadwaladr university health board and Merseyside to work together and build a more in-depth and wide-ranging north Wales medical programme, with specialisms being delivered by the relevant major hospitals on both sides of the border.

For year after year after year, the Labour Welsh Government dismissed warnings that we faced a GP crisis in north Wales, given by professional bodies including BMA Wales, the Royal College of General Practitioners in Wales and by myself and my shadow cabinet colleagues on behalf of the NHS Wales staff and patients who raised their concerns with us. With these warnings ignored, we’ve seen GP practice after GP practice in north Wales giving notice that they will be terminating their contracts with the health board. Yet at the BMA Wales conference last year, on the same weekend that another north Wales GP surgery gave notice that they would be terminating their contact with the health board, First Minister Carwyn Jones claimed that there was no GP recruitment crisis.

Responding to the Royal College of General Practitioners Wales ‘Put Patients First: Back General Practice’ campaign during the last Assembly, I met a group of GPs in north Wales whose key concern, they told me, was recruitment. Although the average age of GPs in north Wales was over 50, they told me they couldn’t get medical students to come and train in north Wales. They told me there was a particular problem with the way—quote—’Cardiff recruits medical students’, and that medical students need to be incentivised to come to north Wales, especially Welsh speakers, developing home-grown doctors.

Action is also required to address the nonsensical situation in which nurses are being recruited overseas to fill a nurse shortage in Wales but Glyndŵr university is denied funding to train local nurses who can’t go away to university and are therefore going over the border to the English system in Chester. According to the BMA, 2014 figures show that Wales had the lowest number of GPs per 1,000 people in the UK. However, as usual, the Labour Welsh Government rejected all warnings until crisis was upon us and then—quote—’selected percentages to mask the reality that they were doing too little, too late’. This is part of the solution.