Part of 3. 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:23 pm on 20 September 2017.
Thank you for the comments and questions. The health board review, the internal review, I know has regularly been referred to as being flawed. It’s not a whitewash. When you look at and read the report they recognise there were failings in the way they went about their business, both through the initial employment of Kris Wade and through dealing with the complaints that were made about his conduct as an employee of the health board. And I think it’s really important to recognise that we expect health boards to investigate themselves, and to understand, where something has gone wrong, including when it’s gone seriously wrong, they still have a responsibility to investigate that conduct and to try for themselves to understand lessons to be learned, in addition to the ability to have an independent review. I think the fact that they’ve been prepared to say to themselves that they recognise that there were failings, they recognise that the initial complaints were not robustly investigated, that the approach focused too much on the believability of the complainants, rather than actually trying to find the truth—those are things that none of us should try and pretend are not in that report and are not serious issues in the here and now as to how we expect future concerns to be properly and robustly dealt with. In addition to those health boards needing to investigate themselves, I set out in this case, as I said earlier in response to the question and in the written statement, that HIW will undertake their own independent review, they will report and I will ensure that Members are fully up to date, including, of course, making available the report that they do provide.