Part of 3. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 2:53 pm on 19 July 2017.
We certainly want every patient, where a clinical nurse specialist is appropriate to provide care, to have one. The challenge about whether the clinical nurse specialist is the key worker, I think, is different, because, for some people, it need not be the clinical nurse specialist who acts as the key worker, although, in practice, in the great majority of cases, it is the clinical nurse specialist who undertakes that role. There’s been a significant improvement on people knowing who their key worker is. In the previous cancer patient survey, in 2013, 66 per cent of people knew who their allocated key worker was. In this survey, that’s gone up to 86 per cent. Again, this is a significant undertaking. Over 6,700 staff have given up their time to provide their view on a wide range of their own experience of cancer care, and it’s as a result of this wide-ranging survey that we’re able to understand the state of our current services, the areas where we’ve improved, and, equally, those areas where we still need to improve further in the future.