Part of 3. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 2:39 pm on 21 June 2017.
I think that’s a fair point to mention. It’s certainly part of what we discussed in the run-up to the recruitment campaign, and equally, what lots of our junior doctors are very keen to positively sell about Wales. At the BMJ careers fair, where we launched the ‘Train. Work. Live.’ campaign for doctors last autumn, what was really encouraging was not just the people involved in the profession already in Wales at a more senior level involved in promoting the opportunities to work in Wales, but actually junior doctors who attended, who had agreed to come and be part of us having that conversation with peers in that particular event and who came back after their allotted time and spent more time doing it because they believe there’s a really positive offer here in Wales. It is about that mix of understanding—about the balance and the different opportunities. You can be a doctor who wants to work in an urban setting and you can work in the middle of a city like Cardiff, or you can work in Pembrokeshire and Gwynedd with a very different sort of approach. It’s about selling all of those different opportunities. That’s why I’m talking about training, working and living in Wales. It isn’t just about one of those things—it’s a range of different parts.
There’s also got to be the recognition that people’s careers won’t simply be to go into one job and stay in that one job for the whole of their career. People do already move around and that’s more likely to be the case in the future. So, there is a point about having generalists as part of who we need to attract and retain here in Wales, but also to think about the whole career path they have and how we can make it easier to move in different parts of their career, because that is what we need to do successfully in the future. That, of course, is a common challenge right across UK systems. We face many similar challenges and we can always learn what is done successfully or unsuccessfully in other parts of the UK. I am keen that we have an open-minded approach to that conversation in the future.