Part of 3. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 2:42 pm on 21 June 2017.
I think that’s an interesting point to make and one that I’ll certainly discuss with officials, not just in the deanery, but, of course, as we move to the creation of Health Education Wales and to understand what that will look like. I think I’ve indicated that I’ll update Members on the progress of that and the creation of a shadow body to lead to its coming into being in the future. These are subjects that we do talk about regularly with both the BMA and other stakeholders as well.
I met them this week, in fact. I met their representative from the junior doctors committee as part of that conversation about what are the current positions and the challenges over the different contracts in England, and the feeling of juniors in England and how that affects people in Wales and what that means for choices that we want to make here, not just about the contract, but on the different offers that we have on working here as well. Because those different working patterns won’t just be about people going in and out of medicine; it will also be that people want a different work-life balance, as you started off by saying—not just women, but actually lots of men will want a different work-life balance. There’s a very different, and I think a very welcome, attitude to what it is to be a parent, and that means that people will want to work different hours and try to manage having other things outside their life. The way that people trained in the past isn’t something we want to reinvent, where people worked crazy hours as part of what they were doing.
That means that we have to think more about the resource that we have in financial terms and how we use the human resource of the doctors that we’re getting through training and then how we do our best to keep them. So, I’m interested in how we could usefully track the choices that they make and the feedback that they give us and that’s part of what we’re able to do with the current campaign as well. I’m happy to make sure that we share more information with Assembly Members as we get that through the campaign as well about the level of real intent that we’re getting back from people who either decided not to come to Wales—because that’s important too—as well as those who do decide to come here as well. But I’ll certainly take up the particular idea of whether the national training number could be something useful as part of that.