Part of 3. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 3:14 pm on 19 July 2017.
To be fair, this is the general practice committee of the BMA. I’m robustly confident that clinicians in secondary care would not wish to see a significant resource transfer between secondary and primary care. That is an honest part of our challenge: as we increase the money going into the health service—as I said earlier, at a painful and significant cost to other parts of public spending activity here in Wales—when you think about how and where we’ll invest that money, the honest truth is that delivering services in secondary care is more expensive than delivering services in primary care. So, even as we invest in trying to deliver more care closer to home—the example that Angela Burns gave earlier—that doesn’t always have the same cost attached, for example, as the significant capital you need to invest in a new generation of radiologists. So, there are honest choices to make here. What I’m determined to do is, as services move and are reconfigured, that funding is provided to make sure that that service is properly and adequately resourced. I don’t think it’s helpful to try and stick to a percentage figure within the NHS budget as the aim and the objective. The aim and the objective must be to deliver the right care at the right time in the right place, and with the right resources to allow people to do so.