I’d like to thank our Chair of the health committee, and also thank all of the other members on the committee and the people who gave evidence for us to proceed. Problems with recruitment and retention of front-line staff, clinicians in particular, have been well documented in recent years, and we must ensure that we tackle this issue robustly. Staff shortages have led to increased workloads, which have become unmanageable for many front-line staff. Unmanageable workloads have affected staff morale, led to an increase in stress-related illnesses and forced many clinicians to leave the field altogether.

Nowhere is this more evident than in general practice. Some GPs have seen their case loads double in recent years, with practices unable to recruit GPs. A GP seeing over 100 patients during a consultation is not unheard of, so these unmanageable workloads have to be addressed to stop people leaving this profession.

The Royal College of General Practitioners state that we need to recruit an additional 400 GPs over the next four years, and I’d like to discuss how we are going to do this. Above all, we must incentivise clinicians to stay in Wales. We must also ensure young people from all backgrounds are encouraged to train as clinicians. According to the Royal College of Physicians, there is a distinct lack of research undertaken to understand the drivers for recruitment and retention, and decisions on future medical recruitment strategies are not based on robust evidence, so it’s therefore imperative that we do collect as much evidence as is possible to deal with future recruitment campaigns.

But we mustn’t focus solely on front-line staff, because the NHS is Wales’s biggest employer, with around 72,000 people working in it. Collaboration and communication of all departments is a must to ensure its future running. There are just under 6,000 hospital clinicians and 2,000 GPs working in the NHS in Wales. So, without the vast numbers of nurses, scientific and therapeutic and technical staff, patients could not be treated. Without the administration and support staff, our hospitals and GPs wouldn’t function. So, we cannot recruit more clinicians without ensuring that there are sufficient staff to make the appointments, conduct the diagnostic tests, transport patients and nurse patients back to health. The Welsh Government cannot simply divert funds into recruiting more front-line staff. They need to ensure that there are sufficient staff across the whole of the NHS to cope with the increasing demands and changing in demands on the services.

Two weeks ago I was visiting a hospital within my region—the cardiac unit—and one of the nurses was really working non-stop. She stated, without really complaining, that at short notice a member of staff had not turned up, and another nurse was doubling back to do a second duty, as this, they explained to me, was easier than filling in a form for an agency nurse, and on a cardiac unit it was imperative that this complement of staff was at its most. Also, what came out was that our nursing staff sometimes have great difficulty in parking their car when they go to do a night shift or an early evening shift, finishing late at night, and as they cannot park near the hospital, it is a risk for them to travel towards their car.

Also, as has been mentioned before, we must train more Welsh-speaking prospective GPs, and encourage them to take part and be in places, in rural areas in north Wales, which are predominantly Welsh speaking. So, we must do more to recruit Welsh-domiciled students, even if that means lowering the entry qualification, because some people are not getting into, say, Cardiff University, for example, but they are going to London, and we’ve lost the opportunity of recruiting those people.

So I look forward to working with everyone concerned on this issue. Thank you.