I’m very delighted to be able to speak in today’s debate. It must be very hard, Cabinet Secretary, because I know that money is not infinite, but, as David Melding says, this is not a marginal issue, and these young people have every right to access the quality of treatment that we would expect throughout the entire NHS. The long and the short of it is that Wales should have a multidisciplinary paediatric rheumatology service.

I also met Aimee at the event that was held last week, and had a moment of embarrassment, which I’m prepared to completely admit to. She was standing next door to someone else who was on crutches, so I kind of beelined for the person on crutches, because there was this other bright, sparky, bouncy little kid—you know, bing, bing, bing—and I thought, ‘Oh, it must be this person’, and they went, ‘No, this is Aimee’, and there she was. We had a great chat about shopping, about clothes, about getting into Cardiff town centre—really, really excited—and then her dad said to me, ‘But tomorrow she’ll probably be in a wheelchair.’ That really brought it home to me, and I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh’. What a thing to cope with when you’re only—I think she’s seven or eight. One minute you can whizz around and do everything, and the next minute that’s it, you’re completely constrained by two wheels.

I also met a young man who was a bit older and, I have to say, probably a little bit more chippy, because teenage hormones were raging around his body, and he was finding it really tough. He was in a wheelchair and he was clutching a rugby ball and talking about various things, but he said that his life is really tough and he can’t join in with this friends, he can’t go out on trips and all the rest of it, and I just thought, ‘Wow, that really brings it home. This is a life-experience limiting illness/condition/disease.’ And that’s the issue, because a lot of these young kids, if they get support—and one of the big supports that they need and they cannot get and which isn’t available is physiotherapy and occupational therapy and psychotherapy that’s specifically targets the kinds of experiences that they are going through.

I had a long chat as well with Aimee’s father, and he said that he could cope, albeit unwillingly, with having to come up to Cardiff and deal with the adult rheumatologist and so on, but what he really wanted to be able to do was to have near their home in Haverfordwest, trained physiotherapists who could help someone like Aimee to cope with what she’s doing, to make her as strong as possible, to give her the best chance of going through this awful condition, and hopefully emerging out of it the other side as a young adult being the absolute best that she can possibly be. He’s asked Withybush hospital and Glangwili and there’s a real reluctance because they don’t have the staff, they don’t have the training, they don’t have the knowledge, they don’t have the skills. I met with the chief executive, and it was one of the things that we raised, because Aimee, the young man that I met and another young man that I met in my surgery—they all have that absolute right to have those kind of services. If I break my arm and I want physio, I expect to be able to deal with someone who knows how to help me get that strength back.

So, much of this debate is centred on having a centre of excellence, which we absolutely need in Wales, based somewhere sensible where people can get to it, with a targeted paediatric specialist in charge. But it doesn’t stop there. I think that’s the heart of the spider. The legs that go out all through Wales must have all these support services. We must have the occupational therapists, we must have the physiotherapists, and we must have the psychological therapists, because the young man who came to see me in my constituency office was just very unhappy, very down about what was happening to him, very down about his experience, and he couldn’t get the mental health support that he needed. So, it’s a whole range—these people are not just a person with a problem; it’s a complex issue. And I think it must be very hard to be suffering from something that can be so different on a day-to-day basis, and it must really upset the rhythms of your day. So, I would like to plead, Cabinet Secretary, for you to have a look at this whole area, to look at building a centre of excellence. We have the children’s hospital. This could be an absolutely great base to start from and actually put somebody into there who can look after south Wales, and then make plans for how we look after north Wales as well, of course, because children up there are having to travel across borders and so on. So, we need to make sure that we can provide that to mitigate what is a deeply, deeply unpleasant condition.

Final comment: we’ve talked a lot about public health, we talk a lot about the time bomb of the future, we talk a lot about empowering the patient, empowering the carer, hearing their voice and letting people make informed choices. Without having the staff in place and those people being trained to help these people, they can’t do that, they can’t have a voice, and they can’t make informed choices, and that’s what, Cabinet Secretary, we’re asking you to consider putting in place. Thank you.