Thank you for the comments and questions. I’m pleased that there’s recognition of a service innovation that the Member recognises her constituents have commented on positively. It is, of course, a service innovation based around the ABM area, with Carmarthenshire starting afterwards, so a real innovation starting in south-west and mid-west Wales. The challenge always is understanding what you need to do before you actually start with the roll-out, and we did have to make changes. If we’d simply tried to implement the system with the old primary care out-of-hours system, NHS Direct Wales, it would not have worked. We need to get buy-in from clinicians, so actually something has to go into that. It should be easy, if we’re going to roll out the service, to get that sort of buy-in on the back of a successful pathfinder, but there are some pretty significant challenges ahead of that. We need to understand, both from a financing and from a recruitment point of view, about putting more people into clinical contact centres, to make sure that we learn lessons from the scripts that people are given to use and guide people when using the service, and to make sure that we understand we have genuine buy-in from people across the whole health and care system, if this is going to roll out on a national basis.

The roll-out would not be done in a big bang by pushing a switch, I think, to then go across the country at one point in time. I think that would be foolish, and we’d risk trying to deliver what looks like a service innovation and improvement and undermining it by going in that sort of way. So, there must be a proper and organised roll-out. That’s why I indicated in my statement that I’ve asked the programme board to come back to me with a robust plan on the back of an evaluation to understand the choices that are available to us. I will need to come back to Members in the autumn once I’ve had that advice and I can indicate the path that will be taken on rolling out this service.

The other point that I haven’t answered is your point about telemedicine. I think that not just in video-conferencing but in all parts of telemedicine there is huge potential across Wales, and not just for rural Wales, actually, to improve the quality of care, and particularly the quality of experience for individual patients. We see it in some parts of our system already—in eye care, for example, transferring images in a way that is really positive for patients and good for the service, but also delivering a greater efficiency for citizens making use of the service, as well as the staff within it. So, not just in this area but across our whole health and care system there’s a real potential and a need to do that on a more consistent and demanding basis.