Thank you for those comments and questions. I’ll come back to, if you like, the last bit and the first bit and try and take those together. On the point about financial resource, there has been a need for pump-priming to get the service to work, because this is an additional service in some ways, but also we’re trying to bring together things that already exists. So, it’s how current budgets are used, but also how we get people into the right place.

The point about the directory of services is well made, and I tried to convey in my statement about the challenges and questions that are set about options for me as well as the service about how we take this forward. You can understand the attraction of having a national directory of services to allow you to deliver consistency, balanced against the point you make about what is flexibility and the understanding of that. One of the things that we regularly find is that the clinicians, of course, don’t know everything. How could they know every single part of the service that is provided within a health board area, let alone across the country? I think sometimes it isn’t about whether clinicians know all of that; it’s about how you get information to the person who’s advising the member of the public. Equally, we don’t expect the member of the public to know every single thing about how the health and care service system works. It’s about how we help that person to navigate that system and to make the right choices, because that member of the public is still making a choice about what to do.

But I think the most encouraging thing—this comes back to your first and last points—the most encouraging things is that we had a service that was designed in a cautious way, that understood that in parts of England where it had had its most negative publicity, there was something about understanding the model, having enough clinicians to be receiving the call and giving advice in the first point, to make sure that there was high-quality advice being provided—it wasn’t simply about redirecting people into an emergency department. You will have seen, I’m sure, recent reports in the last few weeks that there’s still concern that, in some parts of England, that is what is happening. But we learned directly from colleagues in England, but also from Scotland, too, where they’re taking a slightly more cautious approach.

But, within Wales, we brought together people running out-of-hours services. Steve Bassett, in particular, has been really important, and because clinicians are seeing other clinical leaders bringing things together and having those conversations, it’s made a real difference as to the level of buy-in we had at the start. Because there was scepticism not that long ago whether this would really work, not just amongst the public, but within the clinical community as well. So, we had a sense check done not just by Steve Bassett, but also Linda Dykes, who’s an emergency consultant in north Wales, but she’s also working as a GP as well—she can see both sides of, if you like, the primary and secondary care divide. She’s still doing work on how to bring some of that care together in north Wales too. So, that was important, again, with the buy-in and the credibility that she has.

But the most encouraging part of this is that, yes, you do need to bring those people together to make sure that the clinical support hub and the quality of care that is being provided remotely are actually delivered, but also, we have had really positive statements made from emergency departments about the fact this has been a good thing. Andy MacNab, the lead consultant for emergency medicine in Swansea, has commented that he thinks it’s a good thing and they haven’t seen an inappropriate bounce in numbers in terms of people being inappropriately sent to them, or not sent to them as well.

So, as we go through the evaluation, that’s what I expect to understand—to see what’s come from it—because my anecdotal feedback has been positive so far from individual staff, from the project team and the numbers that they see. It’s a real positive. The PACEC group are the same people who did the evaluation of the new ambulance model, as well. I hope that will give Members some confidence. This is something where you see a different evaluation that has looked critically at what’s been done, talked about those things that have done well, but, equally, pointed out areas for improvement. That’s exactly what we want from the evaluation, and that helped to guide me and the wider service in making choices and providing advice, which, of course, I will update Members on in due course.